Like every year Vodafone has released numbers on mobile network usage during New Year's eve between 8 pm and 3 am as this is one of the busiest times of the year. This year, Vodafone says that 185 TB were used during those 7 hours. Let's say uplink and downlink are roughly 9:1 which would result in a total amount of 166.5 TB downloaded during that time. Divided by 7 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds and then multiplied by 8 to to get bits instead of bytes results in an average downlink speed at the backhaul link to the wider Internet of 53 Gbit/s. An impressive number, so a single 40 Gbit/s fiber link won't do anymore (if they only had a single site and a single backhaul interconnection provider, which is unlikely). Back in 2011/2012 the same number was 'only' 7.9 Gibt/s.
On the other hand when you compare the 53 Gbit/s for all Vodafone Germany customers to the 30 Gbit/s reached by the uplink traffic during the recent 32C3 congress or the sustained 3 Gbit/s downlink data rate to the congress Wi-Fi generated by 8.000 mobile devices, the number suddenly doesn't look that impressive anymore. Or compare that to the 5000 Gbit/s interconnect peaks at the German Internet Exchange (DE-CIX). Yes, it's a matter of perspective!
If you've come across similar numbers for other network operators please let me know, it would be interesting to compare!
Martin,
Video is clearly “eating the world” and yet business models and technology frameworks/platforms remain firmly ground in narrowband voice and store and forward data market principles.
And that’s 1-way video!
What happens when we want 2-way HD collaboration ubiquitously over wired/wireless topologies.
The problem is that taking the current vertically integrated, balkanized edge access model and extending it to these current and future realities (what many are calling “5G”) is a failure to begin with.
Time to rethink business models and strategic frameworks.
Michael