As the NBN Consortium struggles to deliver their fibre network in Australia, Telstra is setting themselves up to be a major provider of entertainment and sporting content with a network of servers that will deliver on demand content direct to a TV, PC or Smartphone from local exchanges.
Their strategy is built around putting content close to consumers because it increases download speeds and reduces download latency. Their invest comes as Companies like Cisco predict that global Internet traffic is set to quadruple in the next four years, networking equipment and video conferencing market leader Cisco has forecast.
At a press briefing yesterday, Telstra said that they had been running trials from their Haymarket Exchange in Sydney with content being streamed to homes over an existing BigPond network. They said that early results saw little if any latency with consumers able to watch a movie within minutes of it being buffered to a hard drive.
They said that the amount of traffic traveling over their existing network is set to double every nine months.
Telstra has also put in place a strategy to instantly scale up a network when a big event such as an AFL or NRL final is being played with insiders claiming that Telstra is also keen to secure broadcast rights to major sporting events.
Under their new structure Telstra will store entertainment content at one point. When a customer orders a BigPond movie the content will be pushed to the customer’s home via a local content server sitting at a local exchange.
If another customer in the same area orders the same movie, the content will be served from the local server. This will save time and improve download speeds claims Telstra’s Chief Operating Officer Michael Rocca, while reducing transmission costs.
This week Cisco said that video traffic will reach 767 exabytes, or more than three quarters of a zettabyte, by 2014, Cisco predicted in its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast. This is the equivalent of 10 times all the traffic traversing Internet Protocol networks in 2008, it adds.
The growth in traffic will be dominated by video, which will make up more than 91% of global consumer IP traffic by 2014, Cisco said. Global Internet video traffic will overtake peer-to-peer traffic by the end of 2010 – the first time in the last 10 years that peer-to-peer traffic has not been the largest Internet traffic type.
Among the factors said to be driving the increase in video traffic are improvements in network bandwidth capacity and Internet speeds, along with the increasing popularity of HDTV and 3D TV.
The highest IP-traffic generating regions will be North America (19 exabytes per month), Asia Pacific (17.4 exabytes), Western Europe (16.2 exabytes) and Japan (4.3 exabytes).
Some other findings from the Cisco VMI report:
By 2014, 3D and HD video will make up 42 percent of total consumer Internet video traffic.
Global file sharing traffic is projected to reach 11 exabytes per month in 2014, growing at 22% CAGR from 2009-2014. But it will make up only 17% of global consumer Internet traffic, down from 36 % in 2009.
Business video conferencing will grow tenfold almost three times as fast as overall business IP traffic, at a CAGR of 57% from 2009-2014.
Global mobile data traffic will increase 39 times from 2009 to 2014. Consumer IP traffic will represent 87% of monthly total global IP traffic; while business IP will take up the remaining 13%.
