Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Video Reaches 40% of Traffic on AT&T's IP Backbone

AT&T's challenge is to deliver more bandwidth in more places while scaling rapidly, said John Donovan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), AT&T, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVII Conference. There are two key drivers for AT&T's network: Mobility and Video.


As recently as three years ago, video was a negligible factor of overall traffic. Last month, video exceeded 40% of total traffic across the AT&T IP backbone.

The proliferation of devices access in the AT&T network has also been dramatic, said Donovan. After 100 yeas of operating networks, AT&T recently surpassed 1 billion devices on the network. Donovan expects it will take less than 10 years to add the next billion devices.


Traffic growth is also huge. Industry-wide, backbone traffic is up dramatically, with growth at 50% year over year.
The company is now handling 15 petabytes of traffic daily.


Donovan said AT&T is uniquely positioned for 3 reasons:

  • 1. Scale and Scope

  • 2. Access network includes both wired and wireless

  • 3. Building an all-IP network


In conclusion, he sees promising times for the business both from a market and technology perspective.


An archived webcast is on the AT&T Investor's webpage.http://www.att.com