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Future Internet Bandwidth Trends: An Investigation on Current and Future Disruptive Technologies

Executive Summary New technologies sometimes result in disruptive changes to the existing infrastructure. Without adequate foresight, industry, academia, and government can be caught flat-footed. In this work, we focus on the trends surrounding home Internet bandwidth — the bandwidth required by end user applications at home. As building and managing last mile network infrastructure incurs substantial cost, the foresight of such trends is necessary to plan upgrades. Using a bottom-up approach, we look at four potentially disruptive technologies, including millimeter wave wireless (mm-wave), the Internet of Things (IoT), Fog Computing, and Software Defined Networking (SDN). We examine use cases proposed by academia and industry, delve into the bandwidth requirements for proposed applications, and use this data to forecast future traffic demands for typical home users. Our projections show that bandwidth changes at end user devices will most likely be driven by two of the above technologies: millimeter wave wireless and Fog Computing. These technologies not only change the peak bandwidth, but also have noticeable secondary effects on bandwidth such as increasing upload bandwidth use, improving flash crowd tolerance, and increasing off-peak demand. While IoT and SDN are important, innovative technologies, they will not drastically alter the bandwidth usage patterns of ordinary users at home. We hope that the data and recommendations from this study can help business leaders and policy makers get an early jump on emerging technologies before they begin to shape the economy and society. ∗This paper was written with financial support from the Time Warner Cable Research Program on Digital Communications, 2013. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of Time Warner Cable or the Time Warner Cable Research Program on Digital Communications.