Digital Home Needs More Juice

Filed in archive Commentary on March 15, 2007

Colin Dixon of The Diffusion Group quantifies the coming home bandwidth crisis. US telcos have a problem. They're selling triple play services with voice, video, and data. But their delivery system to the home can't handle it all. A magnitude more bandwidth is needed to handle multiple high resolution HDTV streams.

He writes:

Within five years, it is likely that many households will need three high-definition streams (one for the living room HDTV, one for the living room HD DVR, and one for the second HDTV in the master bedroom) and two standard definition streams (for standard TVs in rooms such as the kitchen and den). And this bandwidth will need to be available 24 hours day. Using MPEG2, this puts the video bandwidth requirement in the 60Mbps range; even channel bonding falls well short of coping with this demand.

What the solution? Fiber to the home will help, but only in the short-term. Will P2P TV such as Joost help here? Not really. They relieve congestion on the content provider end. But whether the gigabytes are coming from AT&T, Paramount Studios, Amazon, Google, or a P2P user in helena, Montana, they all have to travel the same "last mile" over the telco or cable network to your home.