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GLOBAL FUTURE ANALYSIS


TAILWINDS | DIGITAL BANDWIDTH


When digital information/communication standards came in place, and digital communication starts to developed, and the above mentioned killer apps (email, web browsers and search engines) came into place connections (first dial up, after that continuous online, first fixed line and there days more and more mobile) where boosting peripheral. These transport demand explosion of course lead to an infrastructural (network to network) explosion based on fiber, which was funded by the dot com bubble from 1995 to 2001 and the growth of numbers of and size in internet exchanges. The bubble explode, almost all fiber companies where driven in Chapter 11 or even bankruptcy. But internet use and therefore bandwidth demand keep still growing significant. Peripheral bandwidth still grows and is these days average 5 Mbit/s. Mobile is replacing these days fixed lines a little, but that will be soon grow to higher levels as prices of mobile always online will drop if mobile operators has upgrade their networks to capable of higher bandwidths. Fiber to the business will become more regular, fiber to the curb (street corner) will increase the copper bandwidth of telco's and cable companies. Central infrastructure capacities grows also severely, not by digging new lines on existing routes but by putting new end of line and on the line equipment in place. New fiber lightning equipment makes the use of multicolor lasers in one fiber possible, creating an (only equipment limited) bandwidth. On the question 'what is the theoretically capacity of a pair of fibers?' is the only right answer the rhetorical question 'how many colors are there in nature?' Physical unlimited capacity is what fiber has to offer, the current limits are formed by the current (as in: economic available) status of attached equipment. Fiber networks will be extended more denser in the periphery and more also there will be realized more international routes, but these routes will (for funding reasons) be attached to HVDC based international/intercontinental power infrastructures who will have also build-in optical fibers. This is one of the reasons desert based CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) has a future. Desert states will use the CSP and HVDC combination not only for own renewable power generation and earning export income by power export, but also for connecting their economies and population digitally and redundant to the world. Redundancy is certainly yet an addressable issue in the Emerging World. Cable cuts in the Middle East early 2008 caused off line status for several regions. This is not only a cable issue (physical route), but also a virtual route issue. The BGP4 (Border Ground Protocol) makes it possible to define more routes to the same network (with a cost price based priority). Peering (handling each other traffic for free), transit (handling traffic for payment), BGP4 knowledge (creation of route tables), AS knowledge (proclaiming of Autonomous System characteristics and the routes to them) and IX (Internet Exchange) knowledge can be severely improved in Emerging Countries (like the Middle East) the next years, and give the Emerging World more digital bandwidth and operational redundancy.


Author: Gijs Graafland


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