Where next?
With gigabit connection customers facing a genuine struggle to use up all their available bandwidth, even at peak times, what lies ahead for the broadband industry?
Will the endless drive to deliver faster and faster downloads speeds dissipate? Or will the industry continue to deliver even faster connectivity and hope something comes along to make use of it?
Sam Crawford thinks the focus on download speeds will switch to other metrics. “Speed is definitely becoming less important,” he said, adding that the reliability of the connection is now more critical for customers, especially those working from home. “If there is a 10-minute outage in the middle of the day, or there’s a period of volatility for a few hours where everything slows down massively or is unavailable, then that might not have affected us previously; but, nowadays, we really notice that and it’s really frustrating.”
However, this doesn’t mean that broadband providers will stop cranking up the speeds they deliver to consumers. In the US, AT&T is delivering 5Gbits/sec connections in some locations, with Google Fiber and Comcast also going beyond a gig. In Canada, Bell has a 1.5Gbits/sec plan.
Richard Tang says the 2020s will be “the decade of full fibre,” and that has huge implications for the future of networks. “It’s going to be the last [broadband] technology transition in our lifetimes, because, with all the previous technologies, they built the broadband service on the back of your old phone line,” said Tang.
The metaverse could chew through bandwidth
“That was put in the ground 50 years ago and was never designed to carry data. Whereas with FTTP, it’s absolutely designed to carry data. The fibre that’s going in the ground now will see us through 1Gb, 10Gb, 100Gb, 400Gb – and whatever is going to come after that.”
“I think we’ll see continued exponential increase in speeds for decades to come,” Tang added.
Virgin Media’s Jeff Dodds agrees, and he isn’t the least bit worried about finding applications that will use that bandwidth. Build it and they will come. “Whether it will be something related to the metaverse, we don’t know, but it’s only by having that bandwidth and that speed available that we will find out. Having that capability triggers interesting and exciting new opportunities and industries.”