¿Internet en 2020: 400 Mbps por hogar?

Dialogic and TNO have jointly researched how the internet will develop over the next ten years. This reveals that the internet will grow by 30 to 40 percent in the coming years. As a result, an average household will have between 75 to 400 Mbps available by 2020. For comparison: currently, a household can download at 5 to 10 Mbps. However, to achieve these speeds, there must also be an infrastructure capable of delivering them. In 2020, fiber optic and cable networks are particularly suitable for this.

More digital services are becoming available, and the adoption, diversity, and dependence on these different services are increasing. Equally important for bandwidth consumption is the fact that services are becoming more broadband-intensive. This is mainly due to the integration of video images in numerous services, even across 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 exogenous growth on the fixed network; only endogenous growth. The growth will need to come almost entirely from 'Dutch people who will use the internet more' and not from 'more Dutch people using the internet'. It is, however, expected that simultaneous usage within households will continue to 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 use a lot of bandwidth – such as Net TV, HD streaming, cloud computing, and HD teleconferencing – adds a great deal of uncertainty to predictions for 2020. The same applies to the accelerated provision of large bandwidths due to significant investments in NGN infrastructure. We anticipate that the current, relatively strong bandwidth asymmetry on the demand side will decrease, but that the asymmetry will remain a permanent feature, with an indicative lower limit of around 1:5. In principle, asymmetric access technologies do not necessarily pose a limitation for facilitating symmetrical services such as HD video conferencing, as long as the upstream speed is sufficiently high and guaranteed.

More information can be found in the report Demand and Supply Next-Generation Infrastructures 2010 – 2020.