TECHNICAL
consumer survey from April 2023, 45% of US survey respondents either strongly agreed or tended to agree with the statement that they watched video clips on a device while watching TV. In addition, there is a growing likelihood of different family members viewing different video streams at the same time, which will also increase bandwidth requirements. Another important point to consider is home working, for which XGS-PON is particularly well suited. For example, almost all office tools are in the cloud, and users would like to access files at the same speed as if a file were on the local hard drive. XGS-PON’s 10Gbps uplink capacity can help fulfill this requirement and delivers an eightfold improvement over GPON. Operators should also look to target home workers since this is a potentially lucrative segment. For example, of the UK respondents to Omdia’s 2022 Digital Consumer Insights survey, 54% stated they would be willing to pay more for a working-from-home service where all work applications were prioritised to offer the best quality. In addition, at the simplest level the gigabit and multigigabit speeds that XGS-PON enables can be valuable to end users that are downloading and uploading large files. It is worth noting along these lines that the average size of a webpage has grown much bigger over time; for example, data from the HTTP Archive shows the average desktop webpage size has increased by 412% since November 2010, so such downloads can potentially take longer than before without faster speeds. Further evidence of the need for XGS- PON comes from growing traffic volumes coupled with operators moving to offer gigabit service tiers. If operators offer a gigabit service tier, then 1Gbps on the PON must be reserved for an end user performing a broadband speed test. As
XGS-PON enables more revenue Delivering premium value to end users XGS-PON enables operators to enhance their residential services with gigabit and multigigabit offerings. Of the operators analysed by Omdia in 2020, 323 offered gigabit access, but by 2022 this number had increased to 451. The number of operators offering 10Gbps speeds also increased strongly, from 36 in 2020 to 55 in 2022. Such offers are becoming increasingly important for several reasons. Video is the biggest driver of bandwidth, and a clear trend of “everything becoming video” is apparent. This means video is not merely restricted to entertainment, home working, or education but has become a most preferred format for sending/receiving information (e.g., as user guides or instructions on how to perform activities such as cooking a recipe). New video-based applications such as virtual reality and cloud gaming are also significant, because they need a higher bit rate per stream, which also increases bandwidth needs. Online gaming, which can incorporate game-playing online via both consoles and PCs, is already hugely important, and one indication of this is that in Omdia’s consumer survey from April 2023, 34% of Australian adult respondents said they were console gamers and 31% that they were PC gamers. The figures were similar for other markets. Moreover, online gaming is likely to grow in importance over time: 49% of Australian adult survey respondents aged 18–24 were console gamers, and 46% were PC gamers. A further driver of increasing bandwidth requirements is the growing number of simultaneous video streams in households. For example, in Omdia’s
Extended Spectrum DOCSIS 4.0 requires changes to passive components and amplifiers, and Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 requires a new breed of amplifiers. By way of contrast, XGS-PON can reuse the same fibre outside plant and, in most cases, the same access nodes, which helps to explain why many cable operators are now upgrading to 10G PON technologies. In addition, XGS- PON offers very large download and upload speed advantages over FWA. Not only can XGS-PON offer higher maximum speeds, there is also much less variability in speeds in comparison with FWA, which is more affected by capacity constraints and by factors such as the local environment, which could affect in- building performance. Figure 3 shows the scale of the speed advantage XGS-PON has over rival technologies. It shows the maximum download and upload speeds offered by Tier 1 US operators over different technologies and demonstrates that operators launching XGS-PON are well placed to position themselves as the operator with the best-quality network. The central idea of investing in FTTP is to provide subscribers with a superior network experience, so upgrading to XGS-PON and putting clear water between FTTP and alternative infrastructures fits very clearly into the overall investment rationale.
Figure 4: Selected countries, share of console and PC gamers among total respondents, April 2023
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Volume 46 No.2 MAY 2024
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