With the plethora of OTT services from the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Go, among others, the average household bandwidth requirements are poised to increase by 31 percent annually over the next five years, according to a recent report.
The report, which was commissioned by Ciena and conducted by ACG Research, said that peak hour average usage per household would increase from 2.9 Mbps this year to 7.3 Mbps in 2018. The abundance of streaming videos across various devices has put an unprecedented strain across metro residential backhaul networks, according to the report.
The report also looked at the transition from broadcast service, which is multicast across the metro network, to streaming video service, which is unicast and distributed to multiple devices in each home, and the impact that shift is having on today’s residential backhaul network.
OTT unicast video traffic was predicted to be 4.6 times greater than traditional multicast traffic by 2018. The shift from viewing video over multichannel TV video subscription services to Internet video was a fundamental driver and accounted for the majority of the bandwidth requirement for all device types.
“The explosion of OTT / unicast service as well as the surging demand for video content is pushing service providers to reassess their existing infrastructure and take steps to enhance their metro network,” said Michael Kennedy, principal analyst, ACG Research. “End-user expectation of a more ‘on-demand’ experience is a dramatic change for networks and requires the underlying infrastructure to evolve in order to give users the experience they expect.”
Other key findings included:
• Usage of Internet video, which includes smart TVs, was expected to grow from 12 percent of overall peak average bandwidth in 2014 to 25 percent in 2018, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56 percent. The use of Internet video represented the largest contributor to household bandwidth consumption by 2018.
• Other factors driving increasing bandwidth requirements include the trend toward multiple Internet-enabled devices in a household consuming content simultaneously; the use of Internet streaming consoles, WiFi- enabled tablets and smartphones, which have the highest device concurrency; the growing adoption of large screen TVs and increased penetration of HDTV; and the emergence of ultra-high definition 4K TV.
• The research found that use of 4K streaming video services will grow from 2 percent in 2014 to 12 percent in 2018. According to the report, 4K-infrastructure is currently deployed in many studios, as is 4K projection equipment in tens of thousands of cinemas worldwide. All of which provides the basis for rapid consumer uptake of 4K TV sets once the price of 4K TVs drops. For those reasons, 4K TV is likely to become a mainstream offering within five years.