Consumers Demand Quality Voice and Video

I ran across Robin Gareiss’ article on bandwidth demands soaring in Network World today and thought I would discuss the consumer side of the problem as well. 

She mentions that:

This is great information for branches, but how does that affect telecommuters and consumers?

I personally work from home about 60% of the time and have found increasing problems getting into our corporate VPN.  Now, while our IT department may not appreciate me mentioning this, it is through no fault of their own.  This is due to the sheer number of users trying to access our internal resources from outside our firewall.  We’re simply oversubscribed.

The coincidental thing is that I was simultaneously having a similar problem on my own home network.  Being a confessed geek, I do have a home network that consists of several computers, printers, and other devices that consume bandwidth.  I regularly move music and video across my network (I love my AppleTV) and find that accessing the Internet with my puny DSL line is simply killing it. 

What did I do?  Well, like any good consumer, I went and bought the latest and greatest in consumer technology:  Gigabit Ethernet.  Yes, I have twelve ports of “Gig-E” in my home.  That really does nothing for my small DSL line, so the router has QoS to help.  I accelerated both web access and email (to make my wife happy).  This helped me tremendously, but I wondered what all the other “average” people would do in this situation.

How will service providers handle the growing need for bandwidth due to increased data for applications like video over IP(my major downfall due to my rampant love of Itunes) and voice over IP?  I saw the problem on my own network and could handle my own prioritizations, but what of my friends and family?  I don’t think they’ll be so fortunate. 

Service Providers:  Be warned, the killer apps are here and they are video and voice!  How will you respond?

Philip Powell
Product Management
Brix Networks