News roundup June 2016

Broadband speed and traffic analysis:

• Cisco published its latest Visual Network Index predicting a near-tripling of IP Traffic by 2020. More than one billion new Internet users are expected to join the global Internet community by 2020, growing from three billion in 2015 to 4.1 billion. Globally, M2M connections are calculated to grow nearly three-fold from 4.9 billion in 2015 to 12.2 billion by 2020, representing nearly half (46%) of total connected devices. Internet video will account for 79% of global Internet traffic by 2020, up from 63% in 2015.
• Akamai’s first quarter 2016 State of the Internet report shows that global average connection speed increased 12% from the fourth quarter of 2015 to 6.3 Mbit/s, a 23% increase year over year. Global 10 Mbit/s, 15 Mbit/s, and 25 Mbit/s broadband adoption also grew significantly in the first quarter of 2016, posting year over year gains of 10%, 14% and 19% respectively. Average mobile connection speeds ranged from a high of 27.9 Mbit/s in the U.K. to a low of 2.2 Mbit/s in Algeria.
• Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report found that on North America’s fixed networks Netflix represented 35.2% of traffic, that streaming audio and video now accounts for 71% of evening traffic and that traffic to cloud storage services such as Dropbox has surpassed filesharing as the largest source of upstream traffic during peak periods. BitTorrent now accounts for less than 5% of total daily traffic in the region.

Undersea cable developments:

• Computing and BBC News reported on plans by Microsoft and Facebook to build an undersea cable across the Atlantic. The 4,100-mile cable will be operated and managed by Telxius, Telefónica's telecoms infrastructure company, has a planned capacity of 160 Tbit/s and is expected to be completed by October 2017.
• Wired reported that Google's 60 Tbit/s Faster undersea cable between the U.S. and Japan entered into service this month.

Digital Skills:

• The Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee published Digital skills crisis, a report warning that the U.K. risks being left behind if the government does not take more action to address the digital skills crisis: “12.6 million adults in the UK lack basic digital skills; 5.8 million people have never used the internet; only 35% of computer teachers in schools have a relevant degree and 30% of the required number of computer science teachers have not been recruited; and 13% of computer graduates are still unemployed 6 months after leaving university.”
• The European Commission set out steps to improve digital skills in Europe, as part of the New Skills Agenda for Europe. A further report found that the use of digital technologies is beginning to have a profound effect on the tasks carried out and the skills required for many jobs outside the traditional office.

Cloud:

• InformationWeek considered the impact of the decision to leave the European Union on how cloud providers will operate within the U.K. in future.
• Gartner predicted that by 2020 a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today, with cloud increasingly becoming the default option for software deployment. It also predicted that by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors' new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only and that by 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centres.

Other news this month:

• Ovum predicted that there will be 24 million 5G subscriptions worldwide at the end of 2021 for mobile and fixed broadband services. The company estimates that that 5G services will be available in more than 20 markets worldwide by the end of 2021, with services in all four major world regions.
• Ericsson announced the successful demonstration of the provision of multi-gigabit connectivity to a moving vehicle using 5G technology: “The 5G device in the Ericsson van was able to maintain a mobile connection with the network of more than 7 Gbit/s as it travelled down the road”.
• Ofcom announced an update to its Mobile Data Strategy to take account of “changes in the landscape for mobile data since May 2014 due to technological and international developments - in particular the early development of 5G technology”.
• Network World reported on research investigating the addition of more light patterns to optical transmissions using holography; this potentially offers a 100-times increase in bandwidth.