The Broadband Evolution

One primary driver toward broadband is the increasing demand for information. Today's key competitive edge is two-fold: It includes both intellectual property (that is, how smart your people are) and the ability to develop and sustain relationships well. To perform well in both these aspects, you need an ongoing stream of the latest information with which to build your knowledge base and, in an attempt to remain competitive and to grow, it is important that you create an infrastructure that encourages fast and effective knowledge exchange.

Another driver toward broadband is the shifting traffic patterns we're now seeing. This chapter looks at which of the traffic types are becoming dominant on the network and what that means to the network characteristics that they call on. Networks are being used more all the time, and we're experiencing rapid technology advances that present us with different strategies and architectures. It becomes increasingly difficult to make a commitment to a set of technologies today because, after all, tomorrow might introduce a vastly improved architecture. Because products and protocols develop so quickly, it is difficult for a given solution to be widely embraced, and without mass appeal, many products and services never have the opportunity to develop in the marketplace.

We're experiencing a wild unleashing of bandwidth, largely driven by developments in both optical networking and wireless communications. We're also seeing a trend toward advanced applications that include high degrees of visualization as well as sensory streams. Finally, convergence is also driving the move to broadband, as industries, devices, and applications find natural synergies in the digital world and merge platforms with one another.

The following sections examine some of these trends in more detail and explore the ways in which they affect next-generation networks.

Communications Traffic Trends

Internet traffic is doubling every 11 months. Along with the increase in the number of users, we're seeing growth of almost 50% per year in the amount of time users are connected; the average connection time is now approaching an hour. Internet-enabled devices, both wired and wireless, will vie more and more for connectivity to the Web; traffic is growing in a number of different dimensions.

We're also seeing a shift from human-to-machine communications to machine-to-machine communications. Today there are some six billion people on earth, only half of whom are served by telephony services. Yet there are 14 billion microprocessors in existence; these smart devices, as part of their intelligence, have communication skills and therefore mandate some network capacity. More and more of the typical business professionals today many of whom work in the high-tech sector and therefore qualify as early adopters already have an average of at least five devices (for example, PCs, cell phones, personal digital assistants, MP3 players, pagers, and even clothing). We're looking toward a future of greater numbers of devices communicating with one another, and someday there will be thousands of such devices for each human. As discussed in Chapter 15, "The Broadband Home and HANs," just about everything you can think of is having some kind of intelligence added to it in order to add value to your life. Devices are now beginning to communicate with each other more than people are communicating with each other, and this situation promises to become further exaggerated in the future.

Communications Backbone Trends

The growth and changes in traffic necessitate changes in the network backbone as well. Before the Internet became commercialized in 1995, backbone traffic was growing at a compound rate of about 6% to 10% per year, which was not much different from the traffic growth on the PSTN and in voice communications. But since that commercialization in 1995, traffic has been increasing at a compound annual rate of greater than 100%, and today the average traffic on the Internet's backbones is 1Tbps.

Backbone trends will be further complicated and driven by the advent of advanced applications that consume bandwidth in petabits per second (Pbps) recall from Chapter 1, "Understanding the Telecommunications Revolution," that 1Pbps is 1,000Tbps. Online virtual reality, for instance, requires 1Pbps to 10Pbps additional capacity on the backbone; 3D holography requires 30Pbps to 70Pbps additional capacity; metacomputing (that is, the harnessing of multiple supercomputers together to compute very significant exercises such as weather prediction and warfare simulation) requires 50Pbps to 200Pbps additional capacity; and Web agents also require an additional capacity of 50Pbps to 200Pbps. The world's first petabits-per-second network was announced by I-21 Future Communications, a subsidiary of Interoute Communications Group, in the year 2000. It will be a fiber system across Europe. When broadband access climbs into the 100Gbps rate, which is projected for later this decade, backbones will require exabits per second (that is, 1 billion Gbps)!

Communications Bandwidth Trends

Technology breakthroughs are having a profound impact on service providers, as demonstrated by the falling prices of intercontinental capacity. The construction cost per 64Kbps has fallen from US$1,400 in 1988 to about US$300 in 1995, to just a couple dollars per line today. Therefore, the market price for intercontinental capacity has rapidly dropped. For example, the market price for a transatlantic 155Mbps link at the start of 1997 was US$20 million; by 1998, it was down to US$10 million; in early 2000 it was down to US$2 million to US$3 million; and in 2001 it had dropped to US$1 million. Another component of the intercontinental capacity equation is the operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) charges. OAM charges are generally about 3% to 5% of the total cost of the line itself, and traditionally that cost increased if more bandwidth was being exercised over the cable length. But the agreements have recently been restructured such that you are charged OAM costs only based on the cable length, so if the cable allows advanced technologies such as DWDM to be applied, in theory, as you exercise more bandwidth, your OAM charges will be a lower percentage of the line cost. We can expect bandwidth charges to continue to drop.

Tremendous growth is occurring in the wireless realm. Wireless capacity is increasing, the per-minute network costs are falling, and data is comprising more and more of the wireless traffic. Wireless is expected to become the dominant form of Internet communication by the end of the decade. High-speed wireless communications will be the prevailing approach to Web access, as well as between components. When this happens, the "anytime, anywhere" inflection point will move the e-commerce platform of choice from the desktop PC to the palmtop. And satellites are playing a bigger role every year in the broadband Internet and data access market.

The unleashing of bandwidth that we're experiencing is causing us to establish a new relationship with bandwidth, and we're beginning to view it as a commodity. The driving forces behind creating a commodities market for bandwidth are an expected bandwidth capacity surplus and a growing need for risk management. Europe may take center stage in bandwidth trading. In the past two years we've seen the introduction of perhaps 20 different bandwidth exchanges. They use varying strategies, but generally they act as lead generators; there is a portal where buyers and sellers of bandwidth can meet and third parties are available to negotiate deals on their behalf. Some exchanges actually switch minutes based on least-cost routing algorithms or other such proprietary schemes.

Despite talk about the deployment of broadband access media in the local loop, the reality is that it still represents a very small percentage of the total access lines worldwide. The majority of access is still occurring via traditional analog modems. The growth in DSL and cable modems should result in some 40 million to 50 million users worldwide taking advantage of such broadband access options by 2003. But compared to the 1 billion or so subscriber lines that exist, even this is a relatively small percentage. Really large-scale rollouts and large takeoff of broadband access are expected to begin to occur around 2003. As you consider broadband access, it is important to keep in mind that adding broadband access lines puts incredible stress on the core network. Upgrades have to occur in parallel to truly manifest the benefits of broadband networking end-to-end. Remember that there are different stages of development between the access network and the core networks; those access options are discussed in Chapter 13, "Broadband Access Solutions."

Communications Application Trends

Another key trend driving the move to broadband is the changing nature of applications. A whole new generation of business-class services are arising from virtual private networks (VPNs), e-commerce, the capability to handle voice and fax over IP, unified messaging applications, multimedia collaboration, streaming media, the capability to host content or applications, and the capability to cache content on the network edges. All these business-class communications require guaranteed performance, so before they can become fully entrenched as network services, they must provide some level of QoS. What is needed for future networks to support these types of business-class services is discussed later in this chapter.

We're seeing a transition from portables to wearables, such as watches with medical monitors and pagers, eyeglasses with embedded computer displays, belts and watches with embedded computers, rings with universal product code readers and displays, and badges that have Internet connections and tiny teleconferencing cameras. For this trend to really take off, we need a broadband wireless infrastructure and personal area networks (PANs) to locally connect all these smart devices. (This is discussed in Chapter 15.)

We are also evolving to new industry models of information processing and communications. As we move more toward pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing, more and more of our senses such as smell and taste will become a part of what we communicate by using a network. Each person will be able to choose the media formats that are conducive to his or her cognitive map and then fully enjoy the realm of sight, sound, smell, and even taste and touch on the network. Visualization will become 3D and life-size, meaning that there will be telepresence. Later this century, we will witness the enhancement and augmentation of our human powers through neural interfaces, bringing about an era, in some 40 years to 50 years, whereby we'll be able to engage in virtuality without the constraint of devices that have to be worn, or enclosed cubicles that have to be entered. Reality will be what you make it!

For these models of information processing to become a reality requires tremendous bandwidth, extremely low latencies (that is, delays) in the network, guaranteed performance (which means administrated QoS), and broadband wireless access as well as PANs.