John Linton Steve attended the NTT annual 'state of communications' seminar in Tokyo this week on his way back from a review of operations in Colombo. It provides one of the world's largest telecommunications company's views of what is going on in our industry and, sometimes, some interesting insights from other attendees. There were many interesting things in Steve's trip summary but the overwhelming point was the huge surge in IP usage over the past three years in both fixed line and mobile services - some 400%+ growth over that time. The other point was the 'closing of the gap' between IP used for mobile services and that used for fixed 'wire' services.
Over the past month Exetel's own use of IP transit passed the 9 gbps level for the first time - a notable mile stone of itself having passed 8 gbps only a 'heart beat ago'. If you look at the MRTG reports in the Exetel User Facilities you can see how IP usage has increased over the past 12 months - a continuously steepening curve with the current 'limit' of 10 gbps likely to be exceeded some time in the new calendar year if growth continues at the current rate. The recent growth has surprised us (and it appears to have surprised more than us) and I have yet to read in any media as to why this has and is occurring. Steve's notes did not contain much in the way of an explanation from NTT as to why this should be the case.
It is the time of year when we look at the IP providers to determine what we might do when our current IP contracts reach their annual review points in March next year. We make a practice of making an in principle decision about whether or not to change one or more of our three providers before the end of December because if we do decide to change it takes around three months to make the necessary arrangements...new connectivity circuits at the current 10 gbps level are not quick to install. First pass, without trying very hard, indicates that pure IP costs have fallen significantly since we 'negotiated' our last contracts which simply follows a long established pattern going back in our experience to 1995. What any final price might be is not possible to estimate at the moment but it will be considerably less than we currently pay. ...which is just as well because we now need to plan to deploy double the capacity we currently have in place and maybe more than treble before the end of the next calendar year.
One of the significant changes that has, at least partially, mitigated the cost to the end user of all this extra usage is that well over a third of the IP used by our residential internet customers is delivered via one or other of the caching engines we deploy (Akamai, Google, Pipe and several smaller resources). The growth in cache usage by our customers has been surprising over the past three years and without it we would have struggled to fund the provision of our residential services. However the current 1 gbps per caching cluster is now proving to be a barrier which we need to address with Akamai, Google etc. Doubtless there is a solution which we will need to find over the coming months.
It would be interesting to find an 'authentic' view on how future use of IP will develop over the coming two years.
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