Europe II 2011 (15)

Theme: Network Capacity - meeting the challenge

Wired and wireless carriers alike are hard pressed to keep up with the rapid growth of digital traffic. Video growth is aggressively pushing network capacity limits - and this is not just for YouTube - non-Internet IP video traffic for high definition video, on-demand viewing, over-the-top content traffic and the like are also growing rapidly. Nevertheless, margins are dropping, since traffic is growing faster than revenues; this will have an impact upon the ability of many service providers to finance the needed network upgrades.

Although business usage is growing, it is growing more slowly than consumer usage. Business traffic margins will remain high, but the need for increasingly sophisticated support, network management and services will strain the resources of many carriers.

Wireless, especially mobile, network traffic is growing - doubling each year in some regions and both the wireless networks themselves, the backhaul networks and possibly fixed broadband access for femtocell offloading will be needed.

The growing popularity of cloud computing and M2M (machine to machine) applications will certainly further complicate this already complex situation.