The Boom For Bandwidth...Or The Boom For Bandwidth Efficiency?

BusinessWeek Mag has a great story Telecom: Back From The Dead

Some of the highlights.

-Today, fully one-third of all Internet traffic comes from Web videos.


-This year broadband adoption among U.S. adults is expected to cross the important threshold of 50%.

-the glut in broadband communications capacity is all but gone

-Thanks to bandwidth-hungry services such as YouTube, global Internet traffic from 2003 to 2006 grew at a compounded annual rate of 75% a year, according to TeleGeography. "When you compound those numbers, I don't care how much inventory you have, it's going to disappear off the shelf," says Level 3 CEO Crowe.

-A dollar spent on telecom infrastructure produces an outsize impact on the U.S. economy as a whole.

-That(Apple's iPhone), in turn, could create ever more demand for servers and routers, video services, and upgraded wireless networks.

-Verizon says it will steal a page from YouTube and allow TV customers to create their own personalized video channels

-While telecom revenues are now 19% higher than they were in 2000, that money supports just 1.1 million workers, down nearly 30% from boom-era levels.

-For the first time, this year the growth rate for new wireless subscribers in the U.S. is expected to decline.

-Back in 2004, Cisco's John Chambers recalls, critics laughed when Cisco rolled out an audacious new router, the CRS-1, capable of transmitting the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a few seconds. Analysts predicted only a handful would sell. This year, thanks to the video bandwidth hogs, sales of the CRS-1 are expected to hit $1 billion, more than double the figure for 2006.

What the article doesn't address is the efficiency of the network. There's lot of available bandwidth, that is not being utilized.

Things to ponder.

What happens when the bandwidth "pipe" is really opened and when sending/receiving any size of data, from any location, are no longer a factor?

What new multi-billion dollar companies are created? How much more efficient does our economy become?

With the proliferation of HDTV, IPTV, VoIP, SoIP, IPv6, YouTube etc how will, or could, this bandwidth demand be resolved?

Over a standard 100Mbps internet connection, TCP typically utilizes less that 3% of the available bandwidth. Downloading over HTTP, a 10 Gigabyte file over a 100Mbps connection from Asia to the United States would require over 18 hours to receive the file.

There's a software solution, that works over any IP network, utilizes up to 96% of the available bandwidth, performs 10-200 times faster, and does this under 20 minutes.

As Todd Dagres from Spark Capital said "Two kinds of IPs (Internet Protocol and Intellectual Property) are creating the biggest opportunity we've seen in a long time, probably since the Internet, in terms of new companies being formed and value being created"

Do you know what technologies, applications, and companies will play a key role?