What are the impacts of changing consumption patterns on bandwidth usage?
July 19, 2021
What is the Problem?
Changing bandwidth consumption patterns due to evolving next generation in home services are going to drive the future capacity needs of an access network. Overlaying this with the COVID-19 (current and future) impact on accelerating the newer service adoption is going to expedite the need for such analysis. This document provides our initial thoughts on analyzing these bandwidth consumption patterns.
Key Takeaways
Bandwidth consumption per sub is a very important metric for operators profitability analysis.
- Classify applications and their usage patterns
- Understand the impact of demographics
- Understand the time of day behaviors
Finally, overlay your NexGen application behavior to get a good understanding on their impact on bandwidth consumption
Executive Summary
The network operators and the policymakers are trying to understand how the per-home data consumption is going to grow. This consumption growth has significant impacts on their access network planning [1]. Creating per home forecast includes a lot of crystal balling. Also, the changing traffic patterns due to COVID-19 are not easy to anticipate, model and make an educated guess on how it is going to evolve. To provide a logical way to analyze this complex problem, in this section, we provide an analysis framework to forecast per home consumption.
As shown in Figure 1, we first understand the classes of applications and their impact on the per home bandwidth consumption. As a next step, we overlay it with the usage patterns such as when will people access such an application (Time of Day usage, number of such devices, etc.). Next, we overlay this with the characteristics (here the throughput) of these applications. And finally, we open a crystal ball to forecast how these needs are going to change for the next few years.
Key Words: Consumption, T4H, QoE, Bandwidth Usage
