Tag: 8K video

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The Industry

How We Use More Bandwidth

We’ve known for decades that the demand for broadband growth has been doubling every three years since 1980. Like at any time along that growth curve, there are those that look at the statistics and think that we are nearing the end of the growth curve. It’s hard for a lot of people to accept that bandwidth demand keeps growing on that steep curve.

But the growth is continuing. The company OpenVault measures broadband usage for big ISPs and they recently reported that the average monthly data use for households grew from 201.6 gigabytes in 2017 to 268.7 gigabytes in 2018 – a growth rate of 33%. What is astounding is the magnitude of growth, with an increase of 67.1 gigabytes in just a year. You don’t have to go back very many years to find a time when that number couldn’t have been imagined.

That kind of growth means that households are finding applications that use more bandwidth. Just in the last few weeks I saw several announcements that highlight how bandwidth consumptions keep growing. I wrote a blog last week describing how Google and Microsoft are migrating gaming to the cloud. Interactive gaming already uses a significant amount of bandwidth, but that usage is going to explode upwards when the machine operating the game is in a data center rather than on a local computer or game console. Google says most of its games will operate using 4K video, meaning a download speed of at least 25 Mbps for one stream plus an hourly download usage of 7.2 GB.

I also saw an announcement from Apple that the users of the Apple TV stick or box can now use it on Playstation Vue to watch up to four separate video steams simultaneously. That’s intended for the serious sports fan and there are plenty of households that would love to keep track of four sporting events at the same time. If the four separate video streams are broadcast in HD that would mean downloading 12 GB per hour. If the broadcasts are in 4K that would be an astounding 29 GB per hour.

The announcement that really caught my eye is that Samsung is now selling an 8K video-capable TV. It takes a screen of over 80 inches for the human eye to perceive any benefit from 8K video. There are no immediate plans for anybody to broadcast in 8K, but the same was true when the first 4K TVs were sold. When people buy these TVs, somebody is going to film and stream content in the format. I’m sure that 8K video will have some improved compression techniques, but without a new compression scheme, an 8K video stream is 16 times larger than an HD stream – meaning a theoretical download of 48 GB per hour.

Even without these new gadgets and toys, video usage is certainly the primary driver of the growth of household broadband. In 2014 only 1% of homes had a 4K-capable TV – the industry projects that to go over 50% by the end of this year. As recently as two years ago you had to search to find 4K programming. Today almost all original programming from Netflix, Amazon, and others is shot in 4K, and the web services automatically feed 4K speeds to any customer connection able to accept it. User-generated 4K video, often non-compressed, is all over YouTube. There are now 4K security cameras on the market, just when HD cameras have completely replaced older analog cameras.

Broadband usage is growing in other ways. Cisco projects machine-to-machine connections will represent 51% of all online connections by 2022, up from 40% today. Parks and Associates just reported that the average broadband home now has ten connected devices, and those devices all make internet connections on their own. Our computers and cellphone automatically update software over our broadband connections. Many of us set our devices to automatically back-up our hard drives, pictures, and videos in the cloud. Smart home devices constantly report back to the alarm monitoring service. None of these connections sound large, but in aggregate they really add up.

And sadly, we’re also growing more inefficient. As households download multiple streams of music, video, and file downloads we overload our WiFi connection and/or our broadband connection and thus request significant retransmission of missing or incomplete packets. I’ve seen estimates that this overhead can easily average 20% of the bandwidth used when households try to do multiple things at the same time.

I also know that when we look up a few years from now to see that broadband usage is still growing that there will be a new list of reasons for the growth. It may seem obvious, but when handed enough bandwidth, households are finding a way to use it.

Categories
The Industry

Telecom Predictions for 2019

It’s that time of year when I look forward at what the next year might bring to the industry. I see the following as the biggest telecom trends for 2019:

5G Will Not Save the World (or the Industry). This will be the year when we will finally stop seeing headlines about how 5G will transform society. There will be almost no actual introduction of 5G in networks, but we’ll still see numerous press releases by the big ISPs crowing about fictional 5G achievements.

CAF II Buildout Nearly Complete, but Few Notice. The CAF II upgrades will not have the impact hoped for by the FCC. Many areas that should have gotten speed increases to at least 10/1 Mbps will get something less, but nobody will officially monitor or note it. Households that buy the upgrades to 10/1 will still feel massively underserved since those speeds are already seriously obsolete.

People Will Wonder Why They Bought 5G Cellphones and 802.11ax Routers. The wireless carriers will begin charging premium prices for 5G-capable cellular phone yet there will be no 5G cell sites deployed. Households will upgrade to 802.11ax WiFi routers without realizing that there are no compatible devices in the home. Both sets of customers will feel cheated since there will be zero improvement in performance. Yet we’ll still see a few articles raving about the performance of each technology.

FCC Will Continue to Work Themselves out of the Regulatory Business. The current FCC will continue on the path to deregulate the large carriers to the fullest extent possible. They will continue to slant every decision in the direction of the big ISPs while claiming that every decision helps rural broadband.

Rural America Will Realize that Nobody is Coming to Help. I predict that hundreds of rural communities will finally realize that nobody is bringing them broadband. I expect many more communities to begin offering money for public/private partnerships as they try desperately to not fall on the wrong side of the broadband divide.

Broadband Prices Start to Climb. 2019 will be the first year that the world will notice the big ISP strategy to significantly increase broadband prices. We saw the first indication in November when Charter increased bundled broadband prices by $5 per month – the biggest broadband price increase in my memory. All the big ISPs are hoping to have broadband prices to $90 within 5 – 7 years.

Corporate Lobbyists Will Drive Policy. In 2018 there were numerous FCC decisions that came straight from the pens of telecom lobbyists. In 2019 those lobbyists will drive state and federal telecom legislation and FCC decisions.

Comcast and Charter Continue to Eat into Cellular Market. These two cable companies will quietly, yet significantly begin eating into the cellular markets in urban areas. I still don’t expect a major reaction by the cellar companies, but by 2020 we should start seeing cellular prices take another tumble.

Household Bandwidth Usage Will Continue to Grow. There will be no slowdown in the growth of household broadband as homes add many more bandwidth-capable devices to their homes. Another few million customers will cut the cable TV cord and ratchet up bandwidth usage. Online programming will routinely first offer 4K video and we’ll see the first commercial 8K video online.

We’ll See First Significant Launches of LEO Satellites. There will be little public notice since the early market entries will not be selling rural broadband but will be supporting corporate WANs, cellular transport and the development of outer space networks between satellites.

25 New Online Programmers Emerge. There will be a flood of new online programming options as numerous companies jump into the market. We won’t see many, and possibly no failures this year, but within a few years the market reality will drive out companies that can’t gain enough market share.

Transport Price Pressure Tightens. Anybody selling transport to cellular companies will see big pressure to lower prices. Those who ignore the pressure will find out that the carriers are willing to build fiber to bypass high costs.

Big Companies Will Get Most New Spectrum. The biggest ISPs and cellular carriers will still gobble up the majority of new spectrum, meaning improved spectrum utilization for urban markets while rural America will see nearly zero benefits.

Categories
Technology

Are You Ready for 4K Video?

The newest worry for ISPs is the expansion of 4K video. Already today Netflix and Amazon are offering on-line 4K video to customers. Almost all of the new programming being created by both companies is being shot in 4K.

Why is this a concern for ISPs? Netflix says that in order to enjoy a streaming 4k signal that a user ought to have a spare 15 – 20 Mbps of bandwidth available if streaming with buffering. The key word is spare, meaning that any other household activity ought to be using other bandwidth. Netflix says that without buffering that a user ought to have a spare 25 Mbps.

When we start seeing a significant number of users stream video at those speeds even fiber networks might begin experiencing problems. I’ve never seen a network that doesn’t have at least a few bottlenecks, which often are not apparent until traffic volumes are high. Already today busy-hour video is causing stress to a lot of networks. I think about millions of homes trying to watch the Super Bowl in 4K and shudder to think what that will mean for most networks.

While 4K video is already on-line it is not yet being offered by cable companies. The problem for most of the industry is that there is no clear migration path between today and tomorrow’s best video signal. There are alternatives to 4K being explored by the industry that muddy the picture. Probably the most significant new technology is HDR (high-dynamic range) video. HDR has been around for a few years, but the newest version which captures video in 10-bit samples adds both contrast and color accuracy to TVs. There are other video improvements also being explored such as 10-bit HEVC (high-efficiency video coding) which is expected to replace today’s H.264 standard.

The uncertainty of the best technology migration path has stopped cable companies from making upgrades to HDR or 4K. They are rightfully afraid to invest too much in any one version of the early implementations of the technology to then face more upgrades in just a few years. But as the popularity of 4K video increases, the pressure is growing for cable companies to introduce something soon. It’s been reported that Comcast’s latest settop box is 4K capable, although the company is not making any public noise about it.

But as we’ve seen in the past, once customers start buying 4K capable TVs they are going to want to use them. It’s expected by 2020 that almost every new TV will include some version of HDR technology, which means that the quality of watching today’s 1080 pixel video streams will improve. And by then a significant number of TVs will come standard with 4K capabilities as well.

I remember back when HD television was introduced. I have one friend who is a TV buff and once he was able to get HD channels from Comcast he found that he was unable to watch anything that was broadcast in standard definition. He stopped watching any channel that did not broadcast HD and ignored a huge chunk of his Comcast line-up.

The improvements of going to 4K and/or true HDR will be equally as dramatic. The improvement in clarity and color is astonishing as long as you have a TV screen large enough to see the difference. And this means that as people grow to like 4K quality they will migrate towards 4K content.

One thing that is clear is that 4K video will force cable companies to broadcast video over the IP stream. A single 4K signal eats up an entire 6 MHz channel on a cable system making it impossible for any cable system to broadcast more than a tiny number of 4K channels in the traditional way. And, like Comcast is obviously preparing to do, it also means all new settop boxes and a slew of new electronics at the cable headend to broadcast IPTV.

Of course, like any technology improvement we’ve seen lately, the improvements in video quality don’t stop with 4K. The Japanese plan to broadcast the 2020 Olympics in 8K video. That requires four times as much bandwidth as 4K video – meaning an 80 – 100 Mbps spare IP path. I’m sure that ways will be found to compress the transmission, but it’s still going to require a larger broadband pipe than what most homes buy today. It’s expected that by 2020 that there will only be a handful of users in Japan and South Korea ready to view 8K video, but like anything dramatically new, the demand is sure to increase in the following decade.

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