Together with Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Dialogic performed a study on how residential upload and download speed demand will have developed by 2022 (I was the project lead for this study). The research focuses on consumers in the Netherlands and other West European countries with highly developed broadband markets. Thestudy is a follow-up to a study performed in 2014 by Dialogic and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).
Dialogic projects that for the period of 2016-2022, annual growth will be equal to 40.5% for downstream and 44.1% for upstream traffic volume. The growth of existing services alone is responsible for a CAGR of 36.6% (upstream) and 31.6% (downstream) respectively.
The volume growth estimates equal our earlier estimate for the period 2013-2020. Traffic volume growth is primarily driven by online video and music services (either streaming or peer-to-peer). Dialogic finds that their earlier predictions match observed traffic volumes. It appears however that the distribution of downstream and upstream traffic over the course of a day both has become more uniform compared to our measurements in 2014. In 2016, consumers on average take 16.5 hours to upload 80% and 14.5 hours to download 80% of their daily traffic volume, which is longer than observed in 2014. As a result, while volumes grow, the required speeds grow less than expected earlier.
The figure below shows that an average subscription will have a sufficient provisioned downstream speed of about 355 Mbit/s in 2020 (compared to 44 Mbit/s in 2016) and an average sufficient provisioned upstream speed of 37 Mbit/s.
Download the report: Beyond fast: how the speed of the internet will develop between now and 2022