North American Network Operators Group
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Re: cost of doing business

  • From: Thomas Kernen
  • Date: Tue Apr 19 02:01:05 2005
Title: RE: cost of doing business
 
That will not be the biggest issue since most of it is live TV hence multicast so that stream will be used by another customer anyway connected to the same customer termination device in the POP. Of course that will also be depended on the port density of the customer termination device. 
 
The real issue is VOD since each stream is a unicast stream per customer and that currently there is no valid implementation that allows one to actually reuse some of that unicast stream content to deliver to other users. Since most VOD is currently on a pay per view model customers should not be actually requesting those streams if not watching them, so for some time that will allow a certain "limitation" in the usage.
 
Related to VOD and bandwidth usage there is some research carried out around the world to solve this issue and one of these solutions might be the "multicast patching", from what I've seen there is still a lot of work to be done before it can comply with an SP's network setup. The other unknown factor is that until now the customer has never had the choice of viewing what he wants when he wants so AFAIK there is no statistical model that exists in the video media field that allows to derive a mathematical model related to VOD consumption.

Thomas
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 4:17 AM
Subject: RE: cost of doing business

The problem I see coming is simple bandwidth wastage driven by NA TV habits.  Many homes have TVs on during the day full time even when not watched.  Now were talking about as much as 10-20 Mbps (depending in HDTV adoption) going into a void.


Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Kernen
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 1:48 AM
To: [email protected]; Andrew Odlyzko
Subject: Re: cost of doing business


>> fwiw, 100mb to the home costs about that in japan
>
>
>
> We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access
> bandwidth.
> It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s
> traffic.
> Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in
> the 5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps.  The main
> purpose of high speed links is to get low transaction latency (as in
> "I want that Web page on my screen NOW," or "I want that song for
> transfer to my portable device NOW"), so utilizations are low.
>

For those of us that are already running triple play architectures and working on the data analysis related to the bandwidth usage growth (in my case over the last 18 months and adding services one after the other) I see this with a different light:

I fully agree with the transaction latency syndrome, people are compulsive customers that want to buy right now and you (as a service provider) want to see to them purchase the service before they change their mind, just need to look at the ringtones market to see how much people are willing to spend within seconds for a piece of music they will replace in a few days/weeks with their next favorite tune from the charts that marketing is feeding them with.

Where I don't agree is on the bandwidth usage analysis, once you add the IP based TV/VOD* services you will be carrying close to 5Mbps on average on your network in the near future. Either for the one of the TV channels (currently the market is talking about 2 concurrent TV channels down the same pipe to an end user's home in the North American model or 1 for the

European) or the VOD. So agreed this is not Internet traffic but you will need to carry it beyond your access termination device (DSLAM/CMTS/ Ethernet

switch) since the economics of the IPTV/VOD market and (current?) technical scalability will prevent you from being able to have a the full IPTV/VOD streaming (= unicast and/or multicast in this case) in each POP to keep the traffic as local as possible. So anyhow within your metro area network accessing and aggregating the customers the amount of bandwith required to service all customers will grow quite a bit with IPTV/VOD services.

IMHO (of course)
Thomas

*Triple play IPTV/VOD = IP packets carrying a video signal using (name your favorite format) either as unicast or multicast stream. This excludes the current hybrid HFC networks that still provide digital TV via an HF stream using (insert your favorite standard here) and the Internet access and voice service over IP.  Anyhow they will migrate once DOCSIS 3.0 and the wideband benefits have been marketed to all the cable operators as the "next big thing" they need to have and hence run an IP only service for all the triple play services.