In December, as reported in Fibre Systems, a study predicted that there will be a 560 per cent increase in data traffic on metro cable networks, driven by an increased demand for video and the continued proliferation of data centres.
The Bell Labs study for Alcatel-Lucent showed that, by 2017, more than 75 per cent of that traffic will stay in metro networks – compared to 57 per cent today. It also indicated that traffic from video services will increase by as much as 720 per cent and data centre traffic will increase more than 440 per cent during the same time period.