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17 May 2012

As data-consumption habits change, there are demands for network access all over.

SATELLITE communications specialist Todd McDonell says that in the past year, his company TC Communications has experienced 100 per cent growth in the consumer uptake of satellite communication phones, which now cost about $600.

”People have become so accustomed to having bandwidth on tap everywhere that they no longer put up with being out of range, even when they’re ‘going bush’,” McDonell says.

TC Communications’ initial clients tended to be early adopters of technology, or the affluent, but the company’s growth sector is coming from ”grey nomads” who want to stay in touch with grandchildren, plus four-wheel-drivers and adventure bikers.

”They’re buying the access to the bandwidth they are accustomed to rather than just the latest technological gadget,” McDonell says.

Every time we turn around, companies are exclaiming how much faster the communications services will be. Consumption of data is like a gas: it expands to fill the void.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics internet activity report for 2010 shows that in December 2010, Australians downloaded 191,839 terabytes of information, almost twice as much as the year before.

But consider this: Google reckons we will create and exchange more data in the next four years than in the history of the world. Cisco has an index that says global online traffic will rise at 34 per cent each year from 2009 until 2014.

What that means is that in 2014, average monthly traffic will be equivalent to 32 million people streaming Avatar in 3D for an entire month.

That’s a far cry from the ’50s, when analog transmissions were sent out to free-to-air TVs and radio, and we would hoist an antenna on the roof to eavesdrop on the signal, sucking it down a cable to the picture tube or the ”wireless”.

Within a few decades, content had evolved into neatly packed plastic: video cassettes with spools, round, reflective DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Now we’re looking at entertainment that’s virtually infinite – fibre-optic telephone lines firing through the latest downloads, playing video clips in seconds and serving up whole TV series in gigabyte bundles. Seems the bandwidth horizon has reached uncharted territory.

John Chambers, director of consumer broadband at Telstra BigPond, which has 47 per cent of the broadband market in Australia, says more than half of BigPond’s broadband users are now accessing high-speed broadband, above 8 Mbps, and that data consumption has virtually doubled in the past year.

”The ABS figures mirror Telstra’s experience, which is pretty much standard across the industry, that we’re seeing a doubling of usage for the standard user, which is pretty phenomenal,” he says.

Chambers says the transition from dial-up to broadband, which began in the early 2000s, is where the internet made its greatest leap. ”Around 2003 is where we were really kicking through the dial-up-to-broadband transition,” he says.

”We moved from click and wait to streaming video on YouTube and it’s completely changed the way we do things because the bandwidth’s enabling it. The next frontier is entertainment coming down via the web with movie downloads, IPTV and catch-up TV, and we’ll see bandwidth go through the roof.”

Chambers says entertainment storage has morphed from the physical, such as the CD or DVD, to the intangible space of the cloud. ”The real shift is the enabling of new types of consumption, like video and music moving from a CD or the DVD to the iPod and then the cloud. It’s not something that you hold in your hand, you just get it when you want it from the web.”

He says that while the demand for mobile broadband is continuing to grow, the real revolution is in home entertainment, with fixed high-speed wireless broadband re-creating the cinema experience faster and cheaper than ever before. ”It’s the fixed broadband that delivers the high-end heavy-lifting applications like movie downloads and movie streaming, as entertainment over the internet becomes more ubiquitous in the household,” Chambers says.

As the second-largest broadband provider in Australia, Optus says the National Broadband Network, which is laying fibre-optic cabling to reach 93 per cent of Australians, will also cement burgeoning bandwidth, especially from the cloud.

”With the rollout of the NBN, we can expect to see more data consumed as higher speeds will mean consumers and businesses are able to download content quicker,” Optus spokesman Daniel Wong says.

”As more services move to the cloud, people will increasingly rely on accessing content on the network and internet rather than content based on their own machines.”

Chambers says the NBN will push interactive features such as video calling and video tutoring, which will eventually become mainstream.

”Video-calling your mum in another state in high definition from your TV will be a great experience, not weird on a little screen, and doing a music lesson by video because you haven’t got a local flamenco guitar teacher won’t be far off.”

The ever-expanding bandwidth horizon has also fast-tracked emergency communications. TC Communications, which deploys bandwidth by air, land and sea, mostly for military and government customers, has used bandwidth to create a new tech frontier in firefighting.

In the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires around Kinglake, the bandwidth supplier upgraded fire-spotting aircraft in Victoria’s State Aircraft Unit to share gathered data in real time with any of the 43 incident-control centres throughout the state. That solution provides simultaneous voice and data communications directly from the plane as it flies over a fire zone.

Adam Damen, technical specialist with the State Aircraft Unit, a joint venture between the Country Fire Authority and the Department of Sustainability and Environment, says that’s a far cry from the 1980s, when aircraft would fly over a fire zone and print the images onto paper, interpret the fire-ravaged landscape, put the results into a tube and drop them on a cricket pitch for pick-up.