Home Bandwidth Demands Set To Rise 31%: Study

An ACG Research study sponsored by Ciena finds that over the top (OTT) video across multiple devices are poised to increase households bandwidth requirements by 31% annually over the next five years.

Peak hour average usage per home will jump from 2.9 Mbps this year to 7.3 Mbps in 2018, holding that such a metric is directly applicable to residential backhaul planning. Ciena and ACG said the forecast will help network planners brace for this coming demand as broadcast video services increasingly get delivered in multicast across the metro network, and distributed as bandwidth-eating unicast streams in the home. The forecast also predicts that OTT unicast video traffic will be 4.6 times greater than multicast traffic by 2018,while usage of Internet video grows from 12% of overall peak average bandwidth this year, to 25% in 2018.