Future of Broadband

.The group that selects this topic as thiers please put your name and composition here!
.Then place your 20 research questions
.Then divide the questions amoungst the group and answer them in this page! (to be done for next week Thursday - 4 May)

GROUP COMPOSITION

We are the MBA students from the Amsterdam Business School UvA. Our Group comprises of:

1. Edurne Ozaeta
2. Jacob Oskam
3. Murat Ögat
4. Magali Bongrand

INTRODUCTION

With more that 100 million broadband users the underlying access technology of the internet is changing. This enables a new set of applications, new business models and the revisiting of old business models. People today spend four times as much time on the internet as in the heydays of 2000. Very different conceptions of broadband access. Several of the cable and television and telecoms companies see broadband as distribution means for, television, similar to the airwaves, but in this case allowing for pay for view access of the content, therefore would like high downstream speeds and low upstream speed. Internet companies (Google, Yahoo, Amazon) see this as interactive infrastructure and therefore want more synchronous (i.e. equal up and downstream speeds). The current debate of net neutrality, is the start of the coming painful convergence of television, music and telephony on the internet and IP as a base architecture. Useful places to look are:

Vint Cerf (at Google)
Broadband use statistics
Music Download models
Broadband providers
IP ver 6
Always On

CATEGORIES

We consider the following questions crucial in understanding the broadband technology and it's future:

1. Basic
2. Current
3. Trend
4. Future

These are elaborated in next section.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Basic Questions

• What is broadband?
• What are the advantages of broadband?
• What are the techniques available?

Current issues

• What are the current usages of broadband?
• What is the current broadband penetration?
• Who are the main players?
• what are the main bottlenecks to broadband diffusion?
• How is the internal rivalry among the main players?

Trend

• What broadband techniques will emerge in the future?
• Will the emerging broadband-over-powerline (BPL) technology be successful?
• What are the future opportunities of broadband?
• Will the limited availabilty of broadband in under-developed countries limit their development?
• What will be the issues raised in mass multimedia download and sharing related to broadband growth?
• When will hardware bottlenecks limit the growth of broadband?

• When will the marginal utility of increased bandwidth be negligible?

In the booming years of computers in terms of speed, the computational speed was doubling every 24 months (Moore's Law) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law . Thas was the main driver of the evolution of the computers from basic fast calculators to today's life support units. However, the exponential growth of the technology didn't stop because of technological limits, but from the end of common demand. Desktop computers of 2006 can address almost every complicated user needs from DVD editing to broadband applications in a satisfactory speed. The marginal need of additional bandwidth is minimal because it practically doesn't matter whether the user runs an application in 0.1 seconds or 0.05 seconds.

The same pattern is observable also in communication. The first bandwidths were so little that it could only carry minimal amounts of data per day. As the Internet booms and bandwidth capacities increase, more applications were developed that push the limits of the bandwidth consumption. This demand for more complicated applications that require more bandwidth still exists (mobile video telephony, on-demand online DVD rental). However, it is definitely going to stop sometime in 10 - 20 years, when bandwidth increase to more than satisfactory speeds for every common application.

This effectively means that the market in every related sector will reach a saturation point, where satisfactory standards emerge and "a next technological wave never comes". Assuming that all competitors are technologically capable enough to imitate others in terms technological complication, efficiency will be the main driver of the competition in such a market. It may be the case that the marginal utility of new standards are so small that nobody would bother to change to new applications.

• What security problems arise by the combination of fast computational speed limits and broadband communications?
• What problems have to be solved before broadband communication can be used as a substitute to other ways of communication?

The future

SCENARIOS

Useful links:

http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,2340,en_2649_34223_36459431_1_1_1_1,00.html