Wireless Connectivity

Bandwidth is a bit like traffic congestion. There’s the notion that if new roads get built, traffic congestion will ease. As any metro area driver can attest, that never seems to work, in practice. New capacity gets absorbed almost immediately and traffic congestion does not improve.

Access bandwidth does not yet suffer from precisely that problem. Still, over time, when provided with more bandwidth, application providers and end users find ways to consume that new bandwidth, creating needs for additional bandwidth.

For the first quarter of 2012, service providers that delivered broadband services exclusively over fiber saw their subscriber endpoints generate over 2.3 times as much downstream traffic and over 2.4 times more upstream traffic than copper-based subscribers, according to Calix.

The survey of 50 independent operating companies and cooperatives from every region of the United States included firms with fewer than 1000 customers to firms with more than 50,000subscriber lines. The average number of subscriber lines was over 6500.

Streaming media represented nearly two-thirds of downstream Internet traffic among U.S. rural service providers, while Internet browsing represents another 22 percent of downstream traffic.

The largest generator of upstream Internet traffic, however, was business services, whichgenerated approximately 40 percent of upstream traffic.

The study shows a significant rise in business-related Internet traffic, now the third largest contributing category to downstream Internet traffic (seven percent) and the largestcontributing category to upstream traffic (40 percent). Business traffic is primarily characterized by its unique security and authentication applications, like Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP), both of which saw large changes in upstream traffic between the fourth quarter of 2011 and first quarter of 2012, according to Calix (News - Alert).

On the consumer front, though video gaming only represented 3 percent of downstream and 8 percent of upstream traffic in the aggregate, video gaming represented 10 percent of downstream traffic and 33 percent of upstream traffic when gaming communications were active.

As virtually all studies find, a minority of endpoints generate a disproportionate share of network traffic. On copper networks, nearly 93 percent of endpoints generated less than 100 GBytes of downstream traffic a month. In contrast, just seven percent of endpoints accounted for 55 percent of overall downstream data consumption (an average of 231 GBytes per month per endpoint).

On fiber networks, the top 8 percent of users generated more than 100 GBytes of downstream traffic a month, and accounted for approximately 65 percent of the downstream capacity in the network each month (an average of 333 GBytes per month per endpoint).

Among the 30 percent of fiber subscribers who consumed more than 20 GBytes per month, those users represented 91 percent of overall network traffic. Results were similar for copper networks.

On the other end of the spectrum in copper networks, nearly 18 percent of endpoints consumed less than 1 GByte per month.  On fiber networks, nearly 21 percent of consumers used less than 1 GByte per month.

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