High definition hell

I recently wrote a fairly tedious note on bandwidth which seems to have gone largely unnoticed, as all good brokers' research deserves, some would say. In it one point I made was that there was no reason to believe that the growth rates observed to date should not get a lot steeper very quickly, and one key driver of this which I cited was the arrival of HD programming (whether as part of telco VOD or on P2P networks). Today I find that the UK-based IP Development Network has done a study on the cost implications of just this issue, and they're pretty devastating in a unicast context - particularly against a background of rising consumer expectations of "free broadband" in the UK market.

(On a separate, but I believe related, note, I understand that CacheLogic is readying some new announcements for release in early August, I would presume related to this issue. Recall that CacheLogic is already working with BitTorrent and NTL on content delivery, and has some other irons in the fire as well.)