In those halcyon days of yesteryear, say 12 months ago, many telecom analysts foresaw a nearly limitless pool of demand for bandwidth, driven by exponential increases in Internet use and high-bandwidth applications such as videoconferencing. The crash of the technology sector has since cast these projections in doubt. Alarmingly, TeleGeography's research shows that real bandwidth deployments are far smaller than predicted.
Most models forecast demand based on end-user traffic.
To test the accuracy of this approach, TeleGeography built a historical inventory of bandwidth actually used in voice and data networks. For example, one demand model estimated that trans-Atlantic Internet capacity would equal 175 Gbps in 2000, but TeleGeography's survey data from that year found that aggregated Internet backbone capacity only reached a third of that number. In 2002, TeleGeography projects that the supply of trans-Atlantic bandwidth will total 3,494 Gbps. Even if Internet backbones quadruple in size, and other networks experience double-digit growth, bandwidth deployed by carriers and ISPs will amount to only 532 Gbps. In other words, used bandwidth will account for less than 20 percent of estimated supply.