Major broadband speed increase only a year or two away

A great thing about the internet is the way consumer demand pushes suppliers to perform better, not only in the commercial arena, but also in the technological arena.

America’s network companies are under real pressure to enable what online customers want to do – and currently they want to access more and more video online. That puts a huge strain on existing bandwidth, with some analysts suggesting the internet may actually collapse under the load. If you are Telkom, your reaction to massive demand is to push up your prices and put a cap on bandwidth supply. If you are Alcatel-Lucent or Siemens, your reaction is to invest in ways to supply more bandwidth.

Since putting in new networks of fiber-optic cables is massively costly, researchers are trying to find ways to push more data through the existing infrastructure. And they are succeeding.

The current bandwidth target is 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). Siemens claimed this month that it has sent data at 111 gigabits per second over 10 channels on a single fiber over a distance of 2,400 kilometers. Bell Labs (part of Alcatel-Lucent) have just demonstrated that they can get the current 40 Gbps backbone (those long-distance data pipelines that connect cities together) to carry 100 Gbps. They are forecasting that, at least in America, video on demand is going to make up 90 percent of online data, and there will be a tenfold increase in the demand for bandwidth.

(If you think 100Gbps is impressive, Bell Labs also successfully transmitted data across 80km on a single fiberoptic strand at a speed of 25.6 terabits per second, which is like downloading more than 43 thousand music CDs in only one second…)

So, just as ADSL technology allows us to get relatively high speed data over existing phone lines, anyone in the world with access to existing fiber-optic networks should in the near future be able to get much better data rates through them.

Now if only Telkom can be persuaded to stop spending money acquiring other African phone companies and start investing in South African infrastructure, maybe we can start to catch up with 21st century economies.