Thursday, July 06, 2006

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.)

No comments: