Wholesale and Capacity

By Jeff Gilbert, VP Strategy and Business Development, Content Providers, Qwilt

The biggest challenge facing OTT content delivery is not speed, as is commonly thought, but rather capacity. As you have probably heard by now, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton directly asked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to stop streaming video in HD in order to ‘secure internet access for all.’ As a direct result of the pandemic, many more people than usual are at home watching Netflix and other streaming services and, in Thierry’s view, are effectively clogging the Internet. In response, Netflix agreed to lower their streaming bandwidth in the EU for 30 days, even though they believe their Open Connect service is already helping service providers, and that their streams already adapt based on available bandwidth.

Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier and Orange International Carriers have connected their networks, so both companies can offer their customers HD voice services and support the industry with enhanced voice offerings.

Telecom Egypt says it has successfully recovered the service on a number of subsea cable systems in the aftermath of the “dragon” storm.

Türk Telekom International (TTI), the international arm of Türk Telekom Group handling all international data, wholesale voice and roaming business functions, and PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, have signed a long-term master service agreement for TTI to provision Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SDWAN) services in collaboration with PCCW Global for their enterprise customers, reducing unnecessary traffic over MPLS networks and enabling the secure, efficient use of online cloud services while providing more capacity for mission-critical applications.

Dutch operators KPN and VodafoneZiggo have won an appeal against the wholesale broadband regulation passed by the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) in 2018. The corporate appeals court sided with the dominant operators and rejected appeals from rivals T-Mobile and Tele2 Netherlands. 

CityFibre, provider of wholesale fibre network infrastructure, has revealed 36 additional locations to benefit from full fibre as part of its up to £4bn Gigabit City Investment Programme, now targeting up to 8 million premises.

Orange proceeded to land Google’s transatlantic Dunant cable in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, in the Vendée region of France, first and terrestrial stage of the laying of this cable.

Major Pan-African telecommunications service provider, SEACOM, and Tata Communications, a leading global digital infrastructure provider, have joined forces to offer high-speed, reliable pathways between Africa, Europe and Asia to meet the growing demand for connectivity linking these regions.

Nokia Bell Labs announced that its researchers have set the world record for the highest single carrier bit rate at 1.52 Terabits per second (Tbit/s) over 80 km of standard single mode fiber - the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 1.5 million YouTube videos – which is four times the market’s current state-of-the-art of approximately 400 Gigabits per second. This world record, along with other optical networking innovations announced recently, will further strengthen Nokia’s ability to develop networks for the 5G era that meet the ever-growing data, capacity and latency demands of industrial Internet of Things and consumer applications.

As the amount of data being generated continues to increase – from 5G and data-producing devices like sensors and cameras, to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality – new technologies are dramatically reshaping the data center in order to meet the rising demands.