While developments in technology will continue to open up yet more new market opportunities, the explosive bandwidth demand driven by consumers and by large and small businesses is already having a significant impact on network infrastructures across the country – in some cases stretching resources to the limit.
Demand drivers
Higher bandwidth requirements are currently being driven by:
- Growing demand to access applications (video) and data on the move
- An increase in business requirements to store applications at remote sites and offer flexible work styles to their people with minimal geographic constraint
- The growth of 'data hungry' applications generally – including the consumption of HD and 3D video
- The pace at which financial institutions need to exchange large volumes of information in order to remain competitive.
A greater reliance on remote data access, data transfer and storage solutions generally means that customers, especially those in financial, defence and public sectors, are looking more than ever for security, business continuity and guaranteed levels of service.
This overall view of the future is reinforced by the prediction that demand for data centres (supporting pan-sector cloud application demand) will increase by an average of 25 per cent over the next few years.
Implications
Quite simply, those who use and supply 1Gb today will require 10Gb and even multiple 10Gb circuits in the future. As growth returns to the economy we expect to see this requirement increase further still.
Adding smaller bandwidth Ethernet based circuits is an option – but, in the long-term, this is unlikely to be cost-effective (in terms of space and power).
Although Optical circuits require a greater initial investment, the comparative long-term savings can be very attractive and are well worth considering. It is this cost benefit analysis that is already driving many of our customers to choose our higher capacity Optical circuits to meet their needs over the next five years.
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