A year ago, The Wall Street Journal cited an analysis of the mobile handset market by New York-based hedge fund Horizon Research Group. The hedge fund's analysts pointed out that if the handset market grew 35 percent for 10 years, as some in the industry were suggesting, then 8.1 billion handsets would be sold in 2011. Unfortunately, the world's population is forecast to reach a mere 7 billion by then.
Reading this commentary, I started thinking it would be interesting to find out just how much bandwidth ships per year. With Gartner Dataquest's extensive databases at my fingertips, I went to work.
Taking every piece of wired and wireless communications equipment from bland analog cordless telephones to exotic optical cross-connects, system vendors shipped 29.6 Tbits/second of bandwidth in 1999 and 68.8 Tbits/s in 2000. Gross domestic product growth was a strong 4 percent last year, according to the World Bank. Gartner Dataquest's models predict a bandwidth shipment decline to 43.1 Tbits/s in 2001, a year when the World Bank expects GDP growth of approximately 2.2 percent.
Let's take the analysis a step deeper. At the highest level, the communications system world can be divided into four categories: consumer and enterprise customer premises equipment, and access and core infrastructure. From 1999 to 2000, consumer-CPE bandwidth shipped, including bandwidth from devices like telephones and DSL modems, increased from 80 to 197 Gbits/s. For enterprise CPE, which includes devices like network interface cards and LAN switches, bandwidth shipped rose from 20.6 to 51.6 Tbits/s. Shipments of access bandwidth increased from 1.8 to 3.2 Tbits/s, while shipments of core bandwidth rose from 7.1 to 13.4 Tbits/s.
Dividing 2000 shipments of consumer-CPE bandwidth by world population, one finds that 32 bits/s shipped for every man, woman and child on the planet. That does not seem outrageous. Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that access and core grew at roughly the same rate and that this rate was less than that for consumer CPE and enterprise CPE. Again reasonable.
Two things are a bit out of whack. The first is that bandwidth shipment growth was outrageous from 1999 to 2000. The second is that per capita bandwidth shipments for core equipment (2,200 bits/s per capita) were more than four times those of access in both 1999 and 2000. This situation could not last.
Jeremey Donovan (jeremey.donovan@gartner.com) is a Principal Analyst at Gartner Dataquest.
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