There's just no way around it: these days, people want more data access. The increasing role that the Internet plays in our lives, from work to play to school and beyond, is driving a rapidly increasing demand for more bandwidth. Some companies—like Telefonica and Vodafone (News - Alert) Spain—are preparing for this rapid acceleration in demand by building out domestic networks, and the lengths such firms are going to in order to accommodate that new demand are quite impressive.
Telefonica (News - Alert) has reportedly turned to Alcatel-Lucent in a bid to bring in a 100G optical network throughout a large portion of Spain, including the eastern, northwestern, and southern regions. Said network will come with a set of dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) tools complete with optical transport network switching built in, along with aggregation tools to help power the kind of data traffic that will prove necessary in accommodating demand from video and cloud tools. The network will boast a total capacity for 8.8 Tbps, and Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) assures that the capacity can be extended to nearly three times that at 24 Tbps to meet future demand. Plus, the new network will reportedly offer a greater overall resiliency and an auto-restore feature that's based on a generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) control plane.
Meanwhile, Vodafone Spain will step up its own operations with a particular focus on mobile broadband. The company plans to release LTE (News - Alert)-Advanced service in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia this October, a move that is said to fully double the data capacity of the network overall and boost mobile data rates as high as 300 Mbps. This is a smart move, as at the same time, the company plans to bring out voice over LTE (VoLTE) service, a move that's likely to increase demand for access. The VoLTE improvements, meanwhile, promise a boost to service, connecting calls in under a second and offering access to things like video calling, streaming, instant messaging, and even navigation functions while talking on the phone itself.
All of this helps to illustrate, quite clearly, the demand for data and network access, not only in Spain, but also beyond. As Alcatel-Lucent Spain's president, Roque Lozano, puts it, “Video is becoming an increasing focus for Telefonica in Spain. That means capacity and reliability are critical elements for its nationwide infrastructure.”
That's absolutely true, but it's not only true in Spain. It's true all over. As more businesses turn to videoconferencing tools to reduce the amount of business travel required or just to keep colleagues in touch, as users cut the cable and switch to Netflix or Hulu (News - Alert) or the like for television, as gamers use connections to take on competitors from around the world, the demand for bandwidth will only increase, and astute providers will take advantage of this rapidly increasing desire to win new subscribers and keep the old.
The plain and simple truth is that demand is not likely to fall off any time soon. With more options available for using data connections, users will turn to these options in progressively larger numbers. Networks can prepare for this access and offer the connections desired, or cap access and attempt to restrict demand, which will likely win no friends in the market. Still, the demand will be there, and those that prepare now are likely to reap substantial reward later.
Edited by Alisen Downey