End users don’t ask for much ; all they want is everything, anywhere, instantly. Demand has gone exponential. So how do we keep up? To answer this, we first need to understand the big ideas that are driving demand.

2. End users don’t ask for much all they want is everything,
;
anywhere, instantly. Demand has gone exponential.
So how do we keep up? To answer this, we first need
to understand the big ideas that are driving demand.
In the beginning,
there was Napster.
When Napster was launched, the world was more
concerned with the Y2K bug. It let people share music for free and it grew quickly by word of
mouth. In today’s terms, the end-user experience wasn’t great. It was limited by the connection
speeds of both the uploader and downloader –
and these were most often dial up connections.
But people didn’t care. At its peak, it had in excess
of 50 million users. It was hailed as the fastest
growing business ever – unless of course, you define a business as something that makes money.
The free business model is not much of a model
if it’s your songs being given away. Metallica and
Dr Dre objected and the courts agreed. In 2001,
Napster was shut down and the music industry bretathed a sigh of relief – that soon became a gasp.
The genie gets
loose
Napster was gone, but it had spawned a new
generation of peer-to-peer technologies that
couldn’t be shut down. Whereas Napster had
been a single, identifiable target, the music industry was now faced with a war on many fronts.
It launched 16,000 lawsuits, but this did little to
stem the flow.
These new file-sharing technologies took advantage of faster home Internet speeds to download
songs faster. But faster downloads also started
to increase end-user expectations. If one file
downloaded faster than another, they noticed
the slow one. People started to become impatient. They wanted their music faster, and as it
turned out, they were willing to pay for it.
Comparing Apple
to peers
Even though the music industry was in a tailspin,
the big labels weren’t willing to sit down and
make a deal. It took the force-of-personality of
Steve Jobs to finally get them to make an agreement that would enable legal music downloads.
In 2003 the iTunes store opened. It offered hundreds of thousands of songs from the major labels. It wasn’t free, but it was legal and it was
fast. Apple’s delivery infrastructure effectively
removed the uploader bottleneck from the equation. Download speeds were now limited only
by the downloader’s connection and songs now
took minutes to download instead of hours. iTunes sold 1 million songs in its first week and has
sold over 10 billion to date.
Bandwidth
takes off
But as much as the success of iTunes was about
Steve Jobs getting the labels onboard, it was
also about the increasing speeds of home broadband connections. When Napster was launched,
only 3% of US homes had what could be called
broadband connections. By the time iTunes was
launched, this had reached 18%. And every type
of connection – broadband or dial up – was getting faster by the year.

3. Nielsen’s Law of Internet
Bandwidth
100,000,000
10,000,000
1,000,000
100,000
10,000
1,000
100
Internet Connectivity
(Bits Per Second)
10
1
1983 1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
2013
Source: Nielsen J, 1998 (updated 2013)
Nielsen’s law states that the speed of a high-end
user’s Internet connection will increase by 50%
each year. This has held true for the past 30 years.
Of course this increase is not universal. Ironically, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said recently
that he still doesn’t have a broadband connection to his California home.
Streaming hits
the spot
By the mid 2000s, connection speeds were fast
enough that not only could people download
songs, they could also stream them live at listenable quality. Internet radio provided a real-time
listening experience but users were still limited to
listening to what was being played.
In 2008 Spotify launched a service that took
streaming to another level: instant music on demand. It was like Napster, but instant. And like
iTunes, it had the backing of the big music labels.
Today, Spotify offers over 16 million songs.
Faster Internet access had made instant musical gratification possible. With it came a quantum leap in customer expectation. Now that they
could have music instantly, there was no going
back. But music was only half the story.
We can’t rewind,
we’ve gone too far.
Having allegedly killed the radio star, video had
moved onto the Internet.
Since the mid 1990s, it had been possible to stream videos. But on a dial up modem it was more
an exercise in patience than entertainment. In
2005 YouTube was launched. It allowed people to
not only stream videos, but also to upload their
own. In this way they created their own content
and avoided Napster’s fate. Soon cat-lovers,
end-users, and companies all over the world
were rushing to put their videos on YouTube.

4. OMG
I’m on YouTube!
Buffering gets
the flick
In the early days, YouTube was as much about
watching the buffering bar as it was about watching the content. To improve the experience, YouTube adopted content delivery network
(CDN) technology to host their most popular
videos in multiple locations around the world.
This enabled them to connect to customers via
the most direct path and the fewest hops. Just
as the shortest physical distance between any
two points is a straight line, the shortest virtual
distance and delivery time between content and
customer can be achieved by a direct connection.
While it was obvious that the world would never
get tired of cat videos, end-users wanted more.
They wanted the premium content that was on
TV and at the cinema. They wanted it in high definition, and of course, they wanted it instantly.
The market was ready for a premium model.
However, less popular videos were hosted
in fewer locations and often provided a lower
quality experience. End users naturally compared. If anything, as home Internet speeds
increased, end users were becoming less satisfied, not more.
But it was still free, and by the end of 2009,
YouTube was getting one billion views per day.
One billion!
By 2013, YouTube accounted for 20% of all US
Internet traffic during primetime. But even that
didn’t make it the biggest.
Netflix was used to doing things differently. In
2007, they sent out their one billionth DVD-inthe-mail. Three years later, they had transformed into the largest source of primetime Internet traffic in the US. By 2013, they accounted for
30% of all US downstream Internet traffic during
primetime.
In terms of numbers, Netflix streams fewer videos
than YouTube, but they are generally much larger
files. Standard definition Netflix content streams
at 3850kb/s and HD content at 5800kb/s. And
with ultra high definition (UHD) standards just
around the corner, this is only likely to grow.
Multiply that by a lot of people, and that’s a lot
of traffic.
At any given time, the Netflix library contains more
than 3 petabytes of movies, TV programs and

5. Increasing Internet connection
speeds and big ideas
video content. Making
sure this is all available on
demand, for customers
all over the world, requires some serious delivery.
Initially, Netflix used a variety of delivery networks,
but eventually economies
of scale meant that they
were better off building
their own.
Netflix
Relative increase in home
Internet connection speeds.
(Based on Nielsen’s law)
In 2012, Netflix launched the Open Connect platform. This is
offered to Internet serNapster
vice providers (ISPs) for
free and encourages
1998
99
00
01
02
them to deploy Netflix
caching servers directly
on their networks. This
lets Netflix preload their most popular content into local caches during off-peak hours,
ready to be downloaded. While this reduces the need for Internet transit for ISPs, the
load remains on their access networks.
Netflix relies on serious bandwidth – it would have
been useless when Napster first came out. The
same is true of all of these big ideas; they only
work because connection speeds keep getting
faster. But as demand continues to grow exponentially, it takes something special to keep up.
Late 90s
DATA RATE
ENABLING
TECHNOLOGY
2.5G
WAVELENGTHS
Spotify
YouTube
iTunes
03
04
05
06
07
09
10
11
12
2013
Year of release
It’s a bird. It’s a plane.
No, it’s a...
Super-channel. That’s the word that is keeping
network providers ahead of demand – at least
for now. We have come a long way from dial up
connections on copper lines, when success was
measured in kilobits. The introduction of optical
fiber meant that by the late 1990s, wavelengths
c2008
10G
08
40/100G
2012
2014
500G
1Tb/s
SUPER-CHANNELS

6. could be used to deliver up to 2.5Gb/s. In
the decade that followed, this grew to 10Gb/s,
40Gb/s and then to 100Gb/s. In 2012,
Infinera took the next step up. Over a section
of fiber on TeliaSonera International Carriers’
backbone between San Jose and Los Angeles;
they sent the world’s first terabit transmission.
It used 2 x 500Gb/s line cards and signaled the
beginning of the super-channel age. Within
a year, this technology was being commercially
deployed. In 2014, 1Tb/s transmissions from a
single card look destined to become a reality.
Super-channel technology will let carriers stay
ahead of bandwidth demand for now. But while
size matters, there is more to demand than that.
Bad ping kills
the game.
With even the heaviest on-demand video,
once the stream is in place, it’s one-way traffic.
Gaming on the other hand brings latency into the equation. Milliseconds mean the
difference between life and death online.
And gamers aren’t known for their patience.
When two players are sharing a console,
latency is not a problem. But when millions of
players all over the world come together to do
battle online – that’s a whole different game. For
low latency, a short path is crucial. And the best
way to achieve that is with a direct connection.
Best effort networks will route traffic halfway
round the world if it gives them a cheaper routing.
Carriers who own their own global backbone
don’t have to compromise. They can provide
a direct connection between players on either
side of the world. This ensures the low
latency and high Quality of Experience (QoE)
that gamers demand. And it’s not just gamers
either. As more of our everyday life moves
into the cloud, low latency and high QoE are
becoming an everyday necessity.

7. The spoiled
generation?
In not much more than a decade, end users
have gone from being happy downloading songs
in hours, to demanding instant-response-HDeverything. Because this has been a gradual
progression, they haven’t really noticed. Wanting
more – and getting it – is all they know. We
have created a spoiled generation. They want
everything – and we need to keep giving it to them.
We don’t know what the big ideas of tomorrow
will be. But it doesn’t take much imagination to
see that they will require more bandwidth and
greater performance. To deliver this, carriers
need to keep investing in technology.
To keep up with demand, carriers should be investing in technologies such as super-channels
to deliver more for less. And for performance,
they should keep expanding their backbones,
to make connection more direct.
We may not be able to predict the
future, but we can be ready.

8. References
All things D (March 2010) The Numbers Behind the World’s Fastest-Growing Web Site: YouTube’s Finances Revealed
http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/
BBC (June 2012)
The Rise and Fall of Napster
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-london/plain/A741089
Cisco (May 2012)
Cisco’s VNI Forecast Projects the Internet Will Be Four Times as Large in Four Years
http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=888280
CNN (Sep 2013)
Ashes to ashes, peer to peer: An oral history of Napster
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/09/05/napster-oral-history/
Computerworld (Feb 2010) Timeline: iTunes Store at 10 billion
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9162018/Timeline_iTunes_Store_at_10_billion
Diode Digital (May 2013) Online Video Statistics 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sVv9CHsY40
Gigaom (May 2012) Spotify said to hit 20M users, but it’s no wunderkind
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/15/spotify-20-million-users/
High Scalability (March 2008)
http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture
Hong Kong Polytechnic University Optical Communications and Networking
http://www.alanptlau.com/Research.html
Inside Facebook (Sep 2011)
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/09/26/spotify-gains-million-f8/
Internet Society (Oct 2012)
Bandwidth Management
http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/BWroundtable_report-1.0.pdf
Florance, K (June 2013)
In public address at Cloud World Forum, London
Messy Matters (Aug 2009)
Anatomy of the Long Tail
http://messymatters.com/anatomy-of-the-long-tail/
Nielsen Norman Group (April 1998, updated 2013) Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

9. References (continued)
Sandvine (Sep 2013)
YouTube’s Double-Dip in Quality
http://www.internetphenomena.com/2013/09/youtubes-double-dip-in-quality/
Techcrunch (Dec 2012) Lars Ulrich, The Notorious Napster Destroyer, Announces His Band Metallica’s Music Is Now On Spotify
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/06/lars-ulrich-the-notorious-napster-destroyer-announces-his-band-metallicas-music-iscoming-to-spotify/
UCLA (Accessed October 2013)
Internet AS-level Topology Archive
http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/topology/
Variety (May 2013)
Netflix Video Puts Even More Strain on the Internet
http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/netflix-puts-even-more-strain-on-the-internet-1200480561
Wikipedia (Accessed October 2013)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
Wired (Nov 2013)
Full Steam Ahead: Inside Valve’s Grand Plan to Replace Game Consoles With PCs
Wikipedia YouTube (Accessed October 2013)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
Wozniak, S (Oct 2013)
In public address at Apps World, London