Christmas and seasonal holidays are closing in. The conversation at Xelerated Xpress will therefore be a bit more silent over the next two weeks.
Next year will indeed be interesting for silicon vendors serving the service provider industry. We will see a continued pull for technologies that enable unified fiber access solutions and increased service density for the metro space at new cost and integration levels.
But for now, happy holidays everyone!
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How much bandwidth we really need is one of the critical questions service providers and policy makers around the world ask themselves as they stimulate and start to invest in Next Generation Access infrastructure. About a decade ago, migrating from dial-up to DSL and cable opened up for the Web and P2P applications. Moving next to fiber will lead to a far more reliable and dynamic digital society, with a range of consumer video applications driving the need for speed.
It’s always hard to imagine the uptake and requirements for future services. By its very nature, the future is unpredictable. Will HDTV take off? Will consumers ever want to narrate their own interactive movies in high definition? Or will they rather just lay back in the sofa and watch IPTV on the big-screen TV? The answers to these questions will have strong traffic planning implications.
Let’s look at what others are predicting. The FTTH council has compiled a list of broadband forecasts in a response to an inquiry about the U.S. National Broadband Plan:
It looks like the industry will broadly accept the 100 Mbps target. How to measure the success, however, is likely to differ. Additionally, when looking at historic growth in broadband bandwidth, 100 Mbps is a reasonable goal for the next 5-10 years. The Swedish Government is aiming for this in its national broadband plan. The objective is to have 40% of Swedish housholds and companies connected at 100 Mbps by 2015, and 90% in 2020. Aggressive? Yes. Probable? Why not?
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Running a service provider business is much about leveraging the economics of scale with streamlined operations. Network maintenance, service and subscriber provisioning needs to run as oiled machinery. Nothing disturbs this operation more than forklift platform upgrades.
As technology ages, it eventually needs to be upgraded or replaced. Management and control plane software can often be upgraded without any hardware impact. But for the network processing line cards, the operator is required to send someone out to the site and swap the card, or in some cases, the complete box.
Forklift upgrades are painful. To send someone out to the field and replace hardware is not only costly, but it also negatively impacts the focus on growth and customer retention.
This is why programmability of the data plane is important. Features and standards evolve, and service providers should not accept being limited by fixed-function ASICs that are several years old and obsolete. Upgrading switches and routers due to the lack of port densities or capacity is one thing. But the lack of the data plane’s ability to support evolving standards or useful vendor specific features is another.
The inherent capability of network processors to be programmed not only enables system vendors to customize the feature set. Its ability to extend the lifetime of the products has a significant impact on service provider business economics. So let’s put the data plane technology designs which cause unnecessary and painful forklift upgrades to the waste bin for obsolete technology.
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December 10 is known to be the date for the Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm and as a coincidence, the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) chose the same date for this year’s GSA awards dinner celebration in Santa Clara. So when I watch the Swedish television broadcasting from the elegant banquet at the Stockholm City Hall, my thoughts are with my colleagues in Santa Clara. Xelerated was awarded for Outstanding Financial Performance by Private Semiconductor Company.
This is a good day to celebrate.
Blog token for Technorati claim: NS7RMYN7GWMZ
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It has proven challenging to get payoff from IPTV investments. The average revenue per IPTV subscriber varies broadly between markets and as a consequence, so does return of investments. In the Asian market, only a handful of the countries have yet to deploy IPTV services, but its role as a major revenue growth driver is still clear. Pyramid Research expects a compound annual growth rate in the 30%+ range for the period 2008-2014. No other broadband service gets even close to this growth rate, reports Light Reading.
CAGR for Asia-Pacific Telecom Services, 2008-2014
Source: Pyramid Research, as reported by Light Reading
The recent IPTV Asia Forum gathered players from China, Japan and South Korea, and while some of the comments focus on the negatives, it is clear that the number of subscribers are growing and that there is significant interest in the technology. In Japan, Hikari TV, the IPTV offering from NTT, is reporting 750,000 subscribers, and China is reporting 3 million subscribers.
The IPTV hype a few years back is gone. This is a good thing. At the time, the average copper-based connection couldn’t fulfil the underlying promise. The level of user interaction was no better than what cable or digital terrestrial could offer. And the quality and availability of the service was not on par with the competitive distribution methods. In short the user experience was not compelling enough.
With the new generation IPTV infrastructure, with mobile broadband and unified fiber access, IPTV will get another chance. Consumers tend to get what they want at the end of the day. And great content at the finger tips will always be compelling.
When the user experience is greatly improved, we will see a quick shift to IPTV.
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It is encouraging to see that the standardization work of 100 GE and 40 GE is coming to an end. Draft version 3, more formally IEEE P802.3ba/D3, is now ready and it looks like it will get passed and submitted to the Sponsor Ballot.
This is the formal start of next generation Ethernet innovation. This is good news for the industry, and well supported by us here at Xelerated.
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Director of Product Marketing. Mr. Lembre joined Xelerated in the summer of 2009...
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