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Dialogic and TNO have researched together how the internet will develop in the coming ten years. It is projected that the internet will grow by 30 to 40 percent in the coming years. This means that by 2020, an average household will have access to speeds ranging from 75 to 400 Mbps. For comparison: currently, a household can download at speeds of 5 to 10 Mbps. However, to achieve these speeds, there also needs to be an infrastructure in place to deliver this. By 2020, especially fibre optic and cable networks will be suitable for this.
More and more digital services are becoming available, with increased adoption, diversity, and dependence on these different services. Equally important for bandwidth consumption is the fact that services are becoming more bandwidth-intensive. This is mainly due to the integration of video content into various services, including across different sectors.
Based on various reputable sources, we estimate that the average bandwidth demand for fixed connections in the Netherlands will grow exponentially between now and 2020, at a rate of approximately 30% to 40% per year.
For several reasons, the researchers have opted for a relatively conservative estimate. The main reason for this is that in the Netherlands, there will hardly be any more exogenous growth on the fixed network, only endogenous growth. The growth will mainly have to come from 'Dutch people who will use the internet more' rather than 'more Dutch people using the internet'. It is expected, however, that simultaneous usage within households will further increase. Calculations show a broad range for the average download speed in 2020, ranging from 75 Mbit/s to 400 Mbit/s. The unpredictability of the success of future services and devices that will consume a lot of bandwidth – such as Net TV, HD streaming, cloud computing, and HD teleconferencing – adds a high level of uncertainty to predictions for 2020. The same applies to the accelerated offering of high bandwidths as a result of significant investments in Next Generation Network infrastructure. We anticipate that the current, fairly strong bandwidth asymmetry on the demand side will decrease, but that the asymmetry will remain a characteristic feature, with an indicative lower limit of around 1:5. In principle, asymmetric access technologies should not limit the effective facilitation of symmetric services such as HD videoconferencing, as long as the upload speed is sufficiently high and guaranteed.
More information can be found in the report Vraag en aanbod Next-Generation Infrastructures 2010 – 2020.