EmTech Spl: Future of Bandwidth

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The world is soon going to face a huge bandwidth crisis. Requirement of bandwidth is likely to increase by five-to ten times with a substantial increase in the mobile user base.

“Internet users are likely to touch 2 billion by 2012 and 50 per cent of these are going to come from wireless mediums. The total world population by 2013 is going to be 6.8 billion and around 80 per cent of these are going to be mobile users. So the demand for bandwidth is going to increase manifold,” said Dr Sanjoy Paul, associate vice president, general manager-research and head, Convergence Technology Lab, Infosys.

He was speaking at a panel discussion on 'Future of Bandwidth and Connectivity’ at Emtech here today.

The session was moderated by Prasanto Kumar Roy, president and chief Editor - ICT Publications at Cybermedia.

Major drivers for upsurge in uptake of bandwidth will be technologies like Telepresence, telemedicine, mobility, and convergence will push this adoption, feel experts in the field.

Panelists at the EmTech conference debating the topic 'Future of bandwidth' felt that going forward, the seamless convergence needed across Wi-fi, cellular and fixed networks will call for change in the basic fundamentals of the way networks talk to each other.

Though the telecom segment is dominated by voice today, this is likely to change in the coming years with the coming up of 3G and other technologies like Wimax, Wi-fi and LTE.

The new technologies are likely to drive the data usage, which is an important factor in the anticipated increase in the bandwidth usage.

Apart from that the new users of mobile as well as other technologies are likely to come from the bottom of the pyramid. “This segment is mostly non-English speaking and computer illiterate. In this scenario, video usage is going to increase, which is further going to drive the demand for bandwidth.”

Technology convergence is further going to fuel the bandwidth demand in the market.

“People are going to demand seamless connectivity. In fact, the technology is available for that but is waiting for regulation. Fiber to home is also happening. I think, we can look forward to nationwide network of Wimax by 2010-2011,” says regional director, India and SAARC and South Asia, Motorola, Bharat Bhatia.

“As a consumer I am happy about bouquet of services which would be available as a result of convergence. But it is also going to lead to turf war between the service providers,” he added.

The panelists also felt that with the massive upsurge in traffic over the Internet, the focus, rather on investing in network intensive hardware, need be on intelligent redistribution of traffic both in space as well as time.

At present, according to the panelists, not many meaningful services were available on the Internet for rural population to see value to spend time, effort and money to spend on these services.

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