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Tech View
Cliff Miyake
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Cisco exec issues warning on bandwidth
Can everyone remember back to the good old days, just before the collapse of Internet Bubble? Not only were the stocks of Internet companies going ballistic but there was a gaggle of telecommunications companies laying fiber optic cable as far as the eye could see. There was so much capacity in those days, everyone in the industry thought it would be years before the dark (or unused) fiber ever saw the light of day.
Well guess what? That unused capacity is just about gone, and over the next few years the industry is going to need as much bandwidth as it can get its hands on. This will will have a profound effect on business in Hawaii.
This was the subject of a talk given recently by Ken Wirt, vice president of consumer marketing for telecommunications giant Cisco Systems Inc. to the Hawaii Broadband Task Force, a group of legislators and telecommunications executives who get together monthly to examine issues affecting Hawaii's innovation economy.
The news that Ken delivered was startling. With the growth of video applications on the Internet, the Internet's infra-structure is simply running out of bandwidth. Its capacity will soon be measured in zettabytes (1 zettabyte equals 250 billion DVDs!).
Wirt said that by 2011 about 60 percent of all Internet traffic will be video. Cisco Systems believes that global IP traffic will increase six times from 2007 to 2012. We'll need to deploy gobs of new fiber in this state to keep up with demand.
Why should you care?
Imagine Oahu without an airport that could handle wide-bodied jets, or a dirt road over the Pali instead of a modern highway.
In the same sense, broadband connectivity is a fundamental element to support productivity, growth and competitiveness. In other words, the more bandwidth we utilize, the more productive we become.
Think about the good old days before high-speed telecommunications and fiber-optic technology. Long distance phone calls were super expensive. The mobile phone that we now carry with us everywhere we go - and the Internet that we depend on daily - did not exist.
Wirt said that if we don't improve our state's telecommunications infrastructure, we're simply not going to be as competitive as other tourist or business centers.