Home Bandwidth Demands Set To Rise 31%: Study

Here’s some good news if you’re a vendor with a stake in ISP upgrade cycles – viewing of OTT video across multiple devices are poised to increase households bandwidth requirements by 31% annually over the next five years.

That’s according to an ACG Research study sponsored by Ciena, a supplier that would also stand to benefit from those findings.

The study, “Forecast of Residential Fixed Broadband and Subscription Video Requirements,” sees the peak hour average usage per home jumping from 2.9 Mbps this year to 7.3 Mbps in 2018, holding that such a metric is directly applicable to residential backhaul planning.

Ciena and ACG said the forecast will help network planners brace for this coming demand as broadcast video services increasingly get delivered in multicast across the metro network, and distributed as bandwidth-eating unicast streams in the home.

The forecast also predicts that OTT unicast video traffic will be 4.6 times greater than multicast traffic by 2018,while usage of Internet video grows from 12% of overall peak average bandwidth this year, to 25% in 2018, a CAGR of 56%.