The internet now plays an integral part in our day to day lives. It influences how we manage our money, communicate with friends and family and how we enjoy our leisure time. Over the next decade, its influence and importance is predicted to get even greater and there are five key activities in particular that are shaping the consumer need for faster and more reliable internet access.
Social Networking
Despite the almost unlimited nature of activities you can get involved in online, 23 percent of time spent online by Americans is on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo.
The influence and use of these platforms has grown exponentially over the last five years and it's predicted to get even greater with the introduction of camera applications and video streaming. High bandwidth demands needed to run such features will put pressure on what service providers can already deliver.
Online Gaming
Online Gaming is another entertainment medium that has seen significant growth over the past few years. The US online gaming market alone is estimated to be worth more than $15 billion incorporating games such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Facebook's FarmVille.
Such has been the rapid rise of online gaming that many manufacturers are talking about ending disc-based production altogether and switching to a purely streaming model of content delivery. If this is the case, a whole new level of bandwidth provision is needed to support, not only the game download, but the online peer-to-peer connection on top of it.
Online Video
It took television 13 years to reach 50 million users. Online video did it in two years. Fueled by popular streaming applications like YouTube and Netflix, online video has seen massive growth. Companies like Netflix have been experiencing 60 percent year on year subscriber growth and there are a number of copy-cat services in the pipeline.
With the convenient nature of streaming movies directly to your computer, online video is causing internet service providers all sorts of headaches regarding bandwidth provision. When more movies start getting released in HD, it opens up a new wave of consumer demand.
Video Chat
Video Chat reached it's peak usage at the end of last year when the Luxembourg-based giant, Skype, announced it had 30 million people online at the same time. A survey conducted by research company In-Stat also recently projected mobile video calling revenue to exceed $1 billion by 2015, by which time North America will be responsible for over 9 petabytes of data traffic per year.
A 2010 report from GigOM Pro estimates that Video Chat calls will reach almost 30 billion calls by 2015, up from the 6 billion made today. This growth is fuelled by the increase in camera enabled smartphones and PCs and laptops. The sheer number of people being involved in two way camera conversations puts pressure on household and area bandwidth demands.
Voice over IP
Similar to Video Chat, Voice over IP services have seen a huge rise in popularity in the US over the last few years. Since the entry of big companies, VoIP services have been emerging at pace. In 2010, US cable companies alone were providing VoIP services to more than 19 million residential subscribers.
While the market is currently dominated by providers such as Vonage and Skype, Microsoft, Apple and Google, have recently come out with their own VoIP projects - which are expected to receive massive interest once the market matures. Again its a pattern of application use that demands bandwidth resources become more available.
Conclusion
The growth and demand for internet-based activities like the ones mentioned above puts massive pressure on service providers to meet demand. With more time being spent online, simultaneously and with greater importance of use, ISPs need to look at the provision of greater download and uploads that improve reliability and delivery.
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