Web 2.0 Traffic Demand on Broadband Infrastructure

I attended an AIIA luncheon recently, where Sol Trujillo CEO of Telstra was the guest speaker.

Sol's presentation topic was "Creating the Future"

abstract: "Sol Trujillo will talk about how life is changing in the Web 2.0 world, the opportunities for Australian customers from Telstra's recent technology deployment, the future that Telstra and the ICT industry can create for Australia and why the window of opportunity is time critical"

Whilst the abstract held great promises for an interesting presentation, I must admit I personally was a little dissapointed as Sol primarily covered off political issues around investment in our national infrastructure. While this is an important issue to discuss, and his views were clearly communicated, I was hoping for more discussion around the exiciting prospect of how Web 2.0 could change (and has already changed) the Australian life, and in particular, how we as an industry could concretely make a difference in creating that future.

Sol did however give us some startling numbers:

- over the last 2 years, the traffic demand on our infrastructure has increased 77 times, with the wi-fi component growing exponentially, multimedia content online contributing towards this significantly, eg. a typical biosymposium webcast to require 4-10 Mbps

- 2.2 billion SMS were sent on the Telstra infrastructure along over the period of FY07 H1, growing 69% compared to the prior period

What an interesting dimension to look at the growth of the web industry! And of the importance of underlying business models coupled with the criticality of the broadband infrastructure!

No wonder there is a bit of a fight for this critical piece of infrastructure!