Fiber and the flood

Last week’s Fiber-to-the-Home conference was turgid with talk of a coming deluge of traffic that threatens to choke today’s telecom infrastructure. Cisco Systems has made similar predictions recently that contradict the popular notion that YouTube and sites like it represent the biggest sources of network traffic going forward.

Such predictions can be easy to believe, especially with carrier networks filling rapidly to capacity these days. And in general, the notion that users will eventually find ways to fill up any pipe you give them--no matter how large--is almost universally conceded. But serious questions still remain about how long it takes to find ways to fill those pipes.

At the FTTH show, the head of Verizon’s FiOS TV content strategy acknowledged that its 100 Mb/s broadband offering is mainly a marketing tactic to wield against cable competitors and that consumers won’t be craving 100 Mb/s for several years.

One Wall Street analyst recently found that Internet traffic growth in Japan, the world leader in FTTH, was only on the order of about 18% per year, prompting him to ask, “What if the demand for massive increases in bandwidth outside a small circle of users simply does not exist?”

And Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who monitors Internet traffic, is telling carriers, “They should start worrying about stimulating traffic as opposed to controlling it.”

I tried to explore these issues in the latest issue of Telephony magazine. Read the story here, and let me know what you think.

E-mail me at ed.gubbins@penton.com.