It's been a busy day, but here are a few midnight musings:
ONO Q3 results - Decent EBITDA, but oh dear, the churn rate of 21.9% is a marked deterioration. I didn't get a chance to listen to the call, but will do so ASAP. It's tempting to assume that this is merely household destruction reversing the trend of household creation in Spain, but it's unclear to me now. Bonds were weaker on the results, and I assume the halls of Telefonica HQ echoed with nervous laughter today.
Dutchness - Regarding yesterday's post on the Netherlands and related themes, there have been a number of comments to the blog and also offline. One of the latter, from a mega-uber value reader who prefers anonymity, suggests that the core network traffic data analyzed by Andrew Odlyzko excludes, to an unquantifiable extent, the local and quasi-local traffic generated by edge applications, which is presumably a major incremental issue for last mile providers.
I agree this is an issue, but unfortunately not easily monitored, as is also the case for bilateral peering of traffic between major incumbents. My crypto-mega commenter also cites raw throughput as something of a red herring in isolation - preferring to focus on performance measures such as latency. This is reasonable and also seems consistent with what I have heard previously from the OFCOM Consumer Panel on potential new definitions for performance metrics. Seems to me there is an opportunity for someone to come up with a sort of reverse DPI application for broadband users, to monitor and report local network conditions for analysis (I first heard this idea suggested by Jonathan Zittrain in late 2006 on a panel we shared, and I still think it's great.).
Meanwhile, KPN issued a press release to calm people down, and friend Vincent Dekker produced an interesting map of fiber in the Netherlands (green dots = FTTH roll-out complete; orange dots = roll-out in progress; blue dots = actively attracting customers but no roll-out yet).
1 comment:
What Europe needs is a similar study to the one done by Kenjiro Cho in Japan. Andrew Odlyzko doesn't seem to be far off. Even though we don't see all traffic we see alot of traffic and it seems the statistics hold even though we can't see everything.
http://www.iijlab.net/~kjc/papers/kjc-conext2008.pdf
It is often argued that rapidly increasing video content along
with the penetration of high-speed access is leading to explosive
growth in the Internet traffic. Contrary to this popular
claim, technically solid reports show only modest traffic
growth worldwide. This paper sheds light on the causes of
the apparently slow growth trends by analyzing commercial
residential traffic in Japan where the fiber access rate is much
higher than other countries. We first report that Japanese residential
traffic also has modest growth rates using aggregated
measurements from six ISPs. Then, we investigate residential
per-customer traffic in one ISP by comparing traffic in
2005 and 2008, before and after the advent of YouTube and
other similar services. Although at first glance a small segment
of peer-to-peer users still dictate the overall volume,
they are slightly decreasing in population and volume share.
Meanwhile, the rest of the users are steadily moving towards
rich media content with increased diversity. Surely, a huge
amount of online data and abundant headroom in access capacity
can conceivably lead to a massive traffic growth at
some point in the future. The observed trends, however, suggest
that video content is unlikely to disastrously overflow
the Internet, at least not anytime soon.
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