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By
Tara
Seals
Network Resurgence
Drives Bandwidth Growth
I
nternet bandwidth continues to explode – and expo-
nentially. As a snapshot: the 65Tbps of new capacity
deployed in 2014 is comparable to nearly the entire
amount of bandwidth in service globally in 2011.
In fact, new data from TeleGeography reveals
that international bandwidth grew 44 percent in 2014, to
reach 211Tbps.
Network operators are meeting bandwidth demand by
both upgrading the capacity of existing cables and investing
billions of dollars in new systems. New cables set to enter
service in 2015 include Asia Pacific Gateway, Hibernia Ex-
press, the Pacific Caribbean Cable System and Bay of Bengal
Gateway. While Africa and Asia have accounted for the bulk
of new submarine cable investments during the past three
years, the focus of new investment is shifting, with more than
$1 billion worth of new cables expected in Latin America and
also on the Europe-Asia route by the end of 2016.
This rapid capacity growth is driven by a changing
mix of global network operators, the firm added. Private
networks, particularly those of large content providers,
account for a growing share of international bandwidth,
even surpassing Internet bandwidth on the trans-Atlantic
route last year. That’s mainly due to the exponential
growth of streaming video.
Consequently, network operation has become a core part
of the business for some of the largest content providers.
For instance, while Internet service providers (ISPs)
get a lot more attention than any of the other players in
the streaming video space, there’s another piece of the
video ecosystem that is becoming absolutely critical to how
content on streaming sites such as Netflix finds its way to
people’s TVs: content distribution networks (CDNs).
A report from BI Intelligence on the video ecosystem
finds that CDNs specialize in delivering large volumes of
traffic over multiple ISPs, varying geographies and piping
it through internet infrastructure. In short, CDNs take the
guess-work and heavy lifting out of the complex task of
delivering video, in a reliable manner, to millions of viewers
served by a variety of different ISPs.
Now, content providers such as Netflix and Google are
continuing to build out their own CDN networks — Netflix
Open Connect and Google Global Cache, respectively — to
better deliver content to consumers and attain more control
over how their traffic is routed. Purpose-built CDNs such as
INTERNATIONAL AGENTs
SECTION
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Channel
Vision
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May - June 2015