It's an upstream world

Forget what you know about network engineering because it's worthless.

That may be a bit extreme, but it's not a bad thought when looking at the new paradigm under which service providers are operating.

For virtually all of its history, the focus of the broadband market has been exclusively on increasing downstream speeds as a means of improving the user experience. And for the same amount of time, it was a logical thought process. Until recently, almost all Internet traffic flowed from the network to the user.

The upstream, or the channel moving from the user into the network, went largely ignored or was considered a dark alley where peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and other illicit acts sapped network resources. This also had its logic, considering much of the P2P traffic was pirated content and sucked up a large amount of bandwidth. Why invest good resources into such a sullied area of the network?

But something happened on the way to the latter part of this decade. Upstream has gone legit. Consider the following facts:

• In Yankee Group surveys, digital cameras consistently appear as the second or third item when consumers are asked to list products they plan to buy in the next six months. The result is a lot of consumers looking for a place online to store their images.
• YouTube receives on average 65,000 contributions per day.
• CNN now regularly uses video footage shot by amateurs and uploaded to its Web site's I-Report section.
• The number of Americans and Canadians working at least part-time from home has grown dramatically as more companies realize the massive benefits in employee happiness (not to mention the added bonus of positioning the company as environmentally sensitive by taking cars off the roads).

These all point to a growing demand for a more robust upstream channel.

Verizon recently responded to this demand by launching a new tier of symmetric Internet access service over its FiOS network, which increases the upstream speed to 20 Mb/s. The new service is among the first symmetric tiers to target U.S. consumers and is being launched in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Just as important, as part of the new tier, Verizon is offering users 1 Gbyte of free online storage with options for up to 50 Gbytes.

So what will a user do with 20 Mb/s of upstream? Isn't it overkill (not to mention poor engineering) to dedicate that much bandwidth when most users barely use a fraction of such capacity? Aside from being the new best friend of BitTorrent users worldwide, the real value in upstream capacity comes in that last bullet point.

Full-time teleworkers love the convenience of no commute, no dress code and a flexible schedule, but they suffer when it comes to connectivity. Sure you can get a fat pipe into the home, but the upstream channel has been limited to 1 to 3 Mb/s, depending on the access technology. Moreover, it's a shared pipe.

Think of the value teleworkers would place on connectivity if it could truly replicate the office environment. With increased virtualization at all levels of the corporate world, data traffic patterns are changing. No longer is the big corporate office automatically the home of the big database. It's just as easy to disperse corporate resources as it is to disperse employees across the globe.

Service providers should stop ignoring upstream or treating it as a necessary evil. The upstream has gone legit and increasingly is a valuable asset that users will want to pay for.

Vince Vittore is a senior analyst for Yankee Group's enabling technologies service provider group with an expertise in broadband solutions.