For years the prevailing belief was that consumers would always outstrip bandwidth supply. From our recent conversations with several land line operators, their experience suggests that in the near-term, that paradigm may not be true.
How could this be?
The answer is fairly simple. Since streaming HD video became all the rage some 10+ years ago, there has not been any real pressure from any new bandwidth-intensive applications. All the while, ISPs have been increasing their capacity. The net result is that many wired providers have finally outstripped demand.
Yes, many video content options have popped up for both real-time streaming and recorded entertainment. However, when we drill down on consumption, we find that almost all video caps out at 4 megabits per second. Combine a 4 megabit per second self-imposed video limit with the observation that consumers are averaging 1 movie for every 3 connected households, and we can see what true consumption is nowadays – at or below 4 megabits per second per house. Thus, even though ISPs now advertise 50 or 100 megabit per second last mile connections to the home, consumers rarely have reason to use that much bandwidth for a sustained period of time. There is just no application beyond video that they use on a regular basis.
What about the plethora of other applications?
I just did a little experiment on my Internet connection leaving my home office. My average consumption, including two low resolution security camera’s, a WebEx session, a Skype call, several open web pages, and some smart devices, came to a grand total of 0.7 megabits per second. The only time I even come close to saturating my 20 megabit per second connection is when I download a computer update of some kind, and obviously this is a relatively rare event, once a month at most.
What about the future?
ISPs are now promising 50 or 100 megabit per second connections, and are betting on the fact that most consumers will only use a fraction of that at any given time. In other words, they have oversold their capacity without backlash. In the unlikely event that all their customers tried to pull their max bandwidth at one time, there would be extreme gridlock, but the probability of this happening is almost zero. At this time we don’t see any new application beyond video that will seriously demand a tenfold type increase in bandwidth, which is what happened when we saw video come of age on the Internet. Yes, there will be increases in demand, but we expect that curve to be a few percent a year.
NetEqualizer News Blog 
India IT a Limited Supply
June 30, 2017 — netequalizerBefore founding my current company, I was on the technical staff for a large telecom provider. In the early 1990’s about half of our tech team were hired on the H-1 visa’s from India, all very sharp and good engineers. As the tech economy heated up, the quality of our Engineers from India dropped off significantly, to the point where many were actually let go after trial periods, at a time when we desperately needed technical help.
The unlimited supply of offshore engineering talent evidently had its limits. To illustrate I share the following experience.
Around the year 2000, in the height of the tech boom, my manager, also from India, sent me on a recruiting trip to look for grad students at a US job fair hosted for UCLA students.
In my pre-trip briefing we went over a list of ten technology universities in India, as he handed me the list he said, “Don’t worry about a candidates technical ability, if they come from any one of these ten universities they are already vetted for competency, just make sure they have a good attitude, and can think out-of-the-box.”
He also said if they did not attend one of the 10 schools on the list then don’t even consider them, as there is a big drop off in talent at the second tier schools in India.
Upon some further conversations I learned that India’s top tech schools are on par with the best US undergrad engineering schools. In India there is extreme competition and vetting to get into these schools. The dirty little secret was that there were only a limited number of graduates from these universities. Initially, US companies were only seeing the cream of the Indian Education system. As the tech demand grew, the second tier engineers were well-enough trained to “talk the talk” in an interview, but in the real world they often did not have that extra gear to do demanding engineering work and so projects suffered.
In the following years, many US-based engineers in the trenches saw some of this incompetence and were able to convince their management to put a halt to offshoring R&D projects when the warning signs were evident. These companies seemed to be in the minority. Since many large companies treated their IT staff, and to some extent their R&D staff, like commodities, they continued to offshore based on lower costs and the false stereotype that these Indian companies could perform on par with their in-house R&D teams. The old adage you get what you pay for held true here once again.
This is not to say there were not some very successful cost savings made possible by Inidan engineers, but the companies that benefited were the ones that got in early and had strong local Indian management, like my boss, who knew the limits of Indian engineering resources.
Share this: