Is AT&T crying wolf?

Last month AT&T Inc. came out with a dire prediction: without substantial investment the Internet's current infrastructure will hit full capacity by 2010. It's no surprise that such warnings promote AT&T's corporate agenda: favourable regulation to ensure the revenue that could support such investment. From a Canadian perspective, however, the US operator's worries appear to be over-stated. "We are on track in Canada ," Alejandro Pares, research analyst for network equipment at IDC in Toronto, tells Network Letter. "We are making the right investments, and on time. We are seeing developments in the provider space. Vidéotron Ltd., for example, is offering five times the broadband speed that they were offering just a year ago." High definition video has been touted as the major bandwidth hog in the future. "Right now HD video can generate ten times more bandwidth than typical video, but I don't see full capacity in Canada in the near term," says Pares. This is a more sober assessment than that offered by Jim Cicconi, VP of legislative affairs for AT&T. He suggested that within three years 20 households could account for more traffic than today's entire Internet. Cisco Canada executives Olaf Krahmer, VP, service provider and Doug Webster, director of strategic communications, worldwide service provider, believe Canada is prepared for increased bandwidth constraints. "AT&T is accurate in that there is rising demand," says Webster. "We are seeing this across all of our customers. However, the providers are getting ahead of it, and should be able to sustain the Internet as a platform for generations to come." Acknowledging that IPTV, and even mobile broadband, will have a dramatic effect on networks, Krahmer nonetheless feels that Cisco's carrier routing technologies, which is used by the likes of Videotron and SaskTel, will be able to handle the traffic. Still, the success of the Cisco's CRS-1 is an indication of how demand has grown, given that it can handle 92 Terabits a second. "At first we thought we wouldn't sell more than 50," says Webster. "We have just passed our 1,800 unit milestone, and we have doubled the number of CRS-1s in the past three quarters - that's 900 since last summer." None of the service providers in Canada are even close to 92 Terabits per second and, should this capacity be reached, there is always the option of adding more line cards. The concern then shifts from the core of the network to the edge, but even here technological advancements should be able to handle the volume. In the end, the fact that this traffic is all IP will result in both greater, and more manageable, traffic. "We are doing an IP traffic study here at Cisco," says Webster. "We're projecting dramatic growth, effectively quadrupling IP traffic in the next four years. This is a massive surge." A massive surge, but nowhere near what AT&T is projecting. At a recent event in London, England, AT&T's Cicconi predicted that broadband traffic would increase by 50 times by 2015. With these numbers, the $19 billion that AT&T is investing in its own network almost seems insufficient. Cisco itself has seen a tripling of growth in internal demand, with 50% of bandwidth now taken by telepresence, the company's high-end video conferencing technology. As a result, Cisco expects that by 2010 telepresence alone will account for the same amount of traffic as the entire Internet did in 2000. The wild card in these estimates is mobile broadband, given the staggered roll-out of leading edge 4G technologies such as WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE). "Mobile broadband penetration will increase dramatically," says Krahmer. "And the demand is there; for example, all the television networks are showcasing their content on the Internet." AT&T's concern is likely informed, at least partly, by a report that came out from Nemertes Research in November, 2007, that claimed the Internet would be experiencing brown-outs by 2010 without billions of dollars in investment. From Nemertes' perspective, the issue isn't so much with core fibre switching and routing, as addressed by the likes of Cisco's CRS-1, but at the edge where access infrastructure may be inadequate. For his part, Cisco's Webster is philosophical about the AT&T predictions. "I interpret this as a call-to-arms," he says. "AT&T is a respected leader, and what they are highlighting is reflected in traffic statistics. They want to make sure that other providers are investing heavily as well." One advantage is that IP-based networks are more flexible, which means that broadband availability needn't always be over-determined by access type. "The way networks are built now you can share the same next generation architecture backbone whether it's wireless or wireline," says Webster. "The architecture is much bigger, and networks are shared, as opposed to the past when the vendors had all of the different functionality built in."

Is AT&T crying wolf?

News | May 20, 2008

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