cross pond high tech

Unicast traffic might account for a small percentage of current video streams on telecom networks but the volume is set to increase dramatically, affecting IPTV-related network investment decisions during the next five years.

That's the view of two operator executives who addressed industry analysts and the media in London Wednesday morning on the fringes of the TV Connectevent at London's Olympia exhibition halls.

 

Ibrahim Gedeon, the CTO at Canadian operator Telus Corp., and Lukas Fluri, head of Product IT & Devices at Swisscom AG, agreed that unicast video traffic (driven by the uptake of catch-up TV services) would grow from current low levels to somewhere in the region of about 30 percent of total video traffic within the next five years. And that, of course, puts greater pressure on network capacity, planning and management.

 

The shift from broadcast to unicast video streams has already forced Swisscom to invest in greater core network capacity alongside ongoing investment in mobile broadband, fiber-to-the-home and DSL vectoring in its wireless and fixed access networks, "all very capex-intensive projects," noted Fluri.