End users don’t ask for much ; all they want is everything, anywhere, instantly. Demand has gone exponential. So how do we keep up? To answer this, we first need to understand the big ideas that are driving demand.

In the beginning, there was Napster.When Napster was launched, the world was more concerned with the Y2K bug. It let people sha-re music for free and it grew quickly by word of mouth. In today’s terms, the end-user experien-ce wasn’t great. It was limited by the connection speeds of both the uploader and downloader – and these were most often dial up connections. But people didn’t care. At its peak, it had in excess of 50 million users. It was hailed as the fastest growing business ever – unless of course, you de-fine a business as something that makes money.

The free business model is not much of a model if it’s your songs being given away. Metallica and Dr Dre objected and the courts agreed. In 2001, Napster was shut down and the music industry bret-athed a sigh of relief – that soon became a gasp.

The genie gets looseNapster was gone, but it had spawned a new generation of peer-to-peer technologies that couldn’t be shut down. Whereas Napster had been a single, identifiable target, the music in-dustry was now faced with a war on many fronts. It launched 16,000 lawsuits, but this did little to stem the flow.

These new file-sharing technologies took advan-tage of faster home Internet speeds to download songs faster. But faster downloads also started to increase end-user expectations. If one file downloaded faster than another, they noticed

the slow one. People started to become impa-tient. They wanted their music faster, and as it turned out, they were willing to pay for it.

Comparing Apple to peersEven though the music industry was in a tailspin, the big labels weren’t willing to sit down and make a deal. It took the force-of-personality of Steve Jobs to finally get them to make an agre-ement that would enable legal music downloads.

In 2003 the iTunes store opened. It offered hund-reds of thousands of songs from the major la-bels. It wasn’t free, but it was legal and it was fast. Apple’s delivery infrastructure effectively removed the uploader bottleneck from the equ-ation. Download speeds were now limited only by the downloader’s connection and songs now took minutes to download instead of hours. iTu-nes sold 1 million songs in its first week and has sold over 10 billion to date.

Bandwidth takes offBut as much as the success of iTunes was about Steve Jobs getting the labels onboard, it was also about the increasing speeds of home broad-band connections. When Napster was launched, only 3% of US homes had what could be called broadband connections. By the time iTunes was launched, this had reached 18%. And every type of connection – broadband or dial up – was get-ting faster by the year.

Nielsen’s law states that the speed of a high-end user’s Internet connection will increase by 50% each year. This has held true for the past 30 years.

Of course this increase is not universal. Ironical-ly, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said recently that he still doesn’t have a broadband connec-tion to his California home.

Streaming hits the spotBy the mid 2000s, connection speeds were fast enough that not only could people download songs, they could also stream them live at liste-nable quality. Internet radio provided a real-time listening experience but users were still limited to listening to what was being played.

In 2008 Spotify launched a service that took streaming to another level: instant music on de-mand. It was like Napster, but instant. And like iTunes, it had the backing of the big music labels. Today, Spotify offers over 16 million songs.

Faster Internet access had made instant musi-cal gratification possible. With it came a quan-tum leap in customer expectation. Now that they could have music instantly, there was no going back. But music was only half the story.

We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far.Having allegedly killed the radio star, video had moved onto the Internet.

Since the mid 1990s, it had been possible to stre-am videos. But on a dial up modem it was more an exercise in patience than entertainment. In 2005 YouTube was launched. It allowed people to not only stream videos, but also to upload their own. In this way they created their own content and avoided Napster’s fate. Soon cat-lovers, end-users, and companies all over the world were rushing to put their videos on YouTube.

100,000,000

10,000,000

1,000,000

100,000

10,000

1,000

100

10

11983 1988 1993 1998 2003 2008 2013

Source: Nielsen J, 1998 (updated 2013)

Internet Connectivity(Bits Per Second)

Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth

OMG I’m on YouTube!In the early days, YouTube was as much about watching the buff ering bar as it was about wat-ching the content. To improve the experien-ce, YouTube adopted content delivery network (CDN) technology to host their most popular videos in multiple locations around the world. This enabled them to connect to customers via the most direct path and the fewest hops. Just as the shortest physical distance between any two points is a straight line, the shortest virtual distance and delivery time between content and customer can be achieved by a direct connection.

However, less popular videos were hosted in fewer locations and often provided a lower quality experience. End users naturally com-pared. If anything, as home Internet speeds increased, end users were becoming less satis-fi ed, not more.

But it was still free, and by the end of 2009, YouTube was getting one billion views per day. One billion!

By 2013, YouTube accounted for 20% of all US Internet traffi c during primetime. But even that didn’t make it the biggest.

Buff ering gets the fl ickWhile it was obvious that the world would never get tired of cat videos, end-users wanted more. They wanted the premium content that was on TV and at the cinema. They wanted it in high de-fi nition, and of course, they wanted it instantly. The market was ready for a premium model.

Netfl ix was used to doing things diff erently. In 2007, they sent out their one billionth DVD-in-the-mail. Three years later, they had transfor-med into the largest source of primetime Inter-net traffi c in the US. By 2013, they accounted for 30% of all US downstream Internet traffi c during primetime.

In terms of numbers, Netfl ix streams fewer videos than YouTube, but they are generally much larger fi les. Standard defi nition Netfl ix content streams at 3850kb/s and HD content at 5800kb/s. And with ultra high defi nition (UHD) standards just around the corner, this is only likely to grow. Multiply that by a lot of people, and that’s a lot of traffi c.

At any given time, the Netfl ix library contains more than 3 petabytes of movies, TV programs and

OMG Buff ering gets

video content. Making sure this is all available on demand, for customers all over the world, requi-res some serious delivery. Initially, Netflix used a va-riety of delivery networks, but eventually economies of scale meant that they were better off building their own.

In 2012, Netflix laun-ched the Open Con-nect platform. This is offered to Internet ser-vice providers (ISPs) for free and encourages them to deploy Netflix caching servers directly on their networks. This lets Netflix preload their most popular con-tent into local caches during off-peak hours, ready to be downloaded. While this red- uces the need for Internet transit for ISPs, the load remains on their access networks.

Netflix relies on serious bandwidth – it would have been useless when Napster first came out. The same is true of all of these big ideas; they only work because connection speeds keep getting faster. But as demand continues to grow expo-nentially, it takes something special to keep up.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a...

Super-channel. That’s the word that is keeping network providers ahead of demand – at least for now. We have come a long way from dial up connections on copper lines, when success was measured in kilobits. The introduction of optical fiber meant that by the late 1990s, wavelengths

1998 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 2013

Year of release

Relative increase in home Internet connection speeds. (Based on Nielsen’s law)

NapsteriTunes

Spotify

YouTube

Netflix

DATA RATE

ENABLINGTECHNOLOGY

WAVELENGTHS SUPER-CHANNELS

c2008Late 90s 2012 2014

10G 40/100G 500G 1Tb/s2.5G

Increasing Internet connection speeds and big ideas

difference between life and death online. And gamers aren’t known for their patience. When two players are sharing a console, latency is not a problem. But when millions of players all over the world come together to do battle online – that’s a whole different game. For low latency, a short path is crucial. And the best way to achieve that is with a direct connection. Best effort networks will route traffic halfway round the world if it gives them a cheaper routing. Carriers who own their own global backbone don’t have to compromise. They can provide a direct connection between players on either side of the world. This ensures the low latency and high Quality of Experience (QoE) that gamers demand. And it’s not just gamers either. As more of our everyday life moves into the cloud, low latency and high QoE are becoming an everyday necessity.

could be used to deliver up to 2.5Gb/s. In the decade that followed, this grew to 10Gb/s, 40Gb/s and then to 100Gb/s. In 2012, Infinera took the next step up. Over a section of fiber on TeliaSonera International Carriers’ backbone between San Jose and Los Angeles; they sent the world’s first terabit transmission. It used 2 x 500Gb/s line cards and signaled the beginning of the super-channel age. Within a year, this technology was being commercially deployed. In 2014, 1Tb/s transmissions from a single card look destined to become a reality. Super-channel technology will let carriers stay ahead of bandwidth demand for now. But while size matters, there is more to demand than that.

Bad ping kills the game. With even the heaviest on-demand video, once the stream is in place, it’s one-way traffic. Gaming on the other hand brings laten-cy into the equation. Milliseconds mean the

The spoiled generation?In not much more than a decade, end users have gone from being happy downloading songs in hours, to demanding instant-response-HD-everything. Because this has been a gradual progression, they haven’t really noticed. Wanting more – and getting it – is all they know. We have created a spoiled generation. They want everything – and we need to keep giving it to them.

We don’t know what the big ideas of tomorrow will be. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that they will require more bandwidth and greater performance. To deliver this, carriers need to keep investing in technology.

To keep up with demand, carriers should be in-vesting in technologies such as super-channels to deliver more for less. And for performance, they should keep expanding their backbones, to make connection more direct.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we can be ready.

In not much more than a decade, end users have gone from being happy downloading songs in hours, to demanding instant-response-HD-everything. Because this has been a gradual progression, they haven’t really noticed. Wanting more – and getting it – is all they know. We have created a spoiled generation. They want everything – and we need to keep giving it to them.

We don’t know what the big ideas of tomorrow will be. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that they will require more bandwidth and greater performance. To deliver this, carriers need to keep investing in technology.

To keep up with demand, carriers should be in-vesting in technologies such as super-channels to deliver more for less. And for performance, they should keep expanding their backbones, to make connection more direct.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we can be ready.

All things D (March 2010) The Numbers Behind the World’s Fastest-Growing Web Site: YouTube’s Finances Revealed

http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/

BBC (June 2012)

The Rise and Fall of Napster

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-london/plain/A741089

Cisco (May 2012)

Cisco’s VNI Forecast Projects the Internet Will Be Four Times as Large in Four Years

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=888280

CNN (Sep 2013)

Ashes to ashes, peer to peer: An oral history of Napster

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/09/05/napster-oral-history/

Computerworld (Feb 2010) Timeline: iTunes Store at 10 billion

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9162018/Timeline_iTunes_Store_at_10_billion

Diode Digital (May 2013) Online Video Statistics 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sVv9CHsY40

Gigaom (May 2012) Spotify said to hit 20M users, but it’s no wunderkind

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/15/spotify-20-million-users/

High Scalability (March 2008)

http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

Hong Kong Polytechnic University Optical Communications and Networking

http://www.alanptlau.com/Research.html

Inside Facebook (Sep 2011)

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/09/26/spotify-gains-million-f8/

Internet Society (Oct 2012)

Bandwidth Management

http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/BWroundtable_report-1.0.pdf

Florance, K (June 2013)

In public address at Cloud World Forum, London

Messy Matters (Aug 2009)

Anatomy of the Long Tail

http://messymatters.com/anatomy-of-the-long-tail/

Nielsen Norman Group (April 1998, updated 2013) Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

References

Sandvine (Sep 2013)

YouTube’s Double-Dip in Quality

http://www.internetphenomena.com/2013/09/youtubes-double-dip-in-quality/

Techcrunch (Dec 2012) Lars Ulrich, The Notorious Napster Destroyer, Announces His Band Metallica’s Music Is Now On Spotify

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/06/lars-ulrich-the-notorious-napster-destroyer-announces-his-band-metallicas-music-is-

coming-to-spotify/

UCLA (Accessed October 2013)

Internet AS-level Topology Archive

http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/topology/

Variety (May 2013)

Netflix Video Puts Even More Strain on the Internet

http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/netflix-puts-even-more-strain-on-the-internet-1200480561

Wikipedia (Accessed October 2013)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

Wired (Nov 2013)

Full Steam Ahead: Inside Valve’s Grand Plan to Replace Game Consoles With PCs

Wikipedia YouTube (Accessed October 2013)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

Wozniak, S (Oct 2013)

In public address at Apps World, London

References (continued)