USTelecom reports Service providers invested $66B in broadband in 2011
U.S.-based wireline service providers are making good on their broadband promise, investing almost $66 billion in new network infrastructure last year, reports USTelecom in a new research brief.
Broadband providers, a group that includes traditional wireline telcos, cable and wireless operators, have invested approximately $1.2 trillion in network infrastructure from 1996 through 2011. Wireline telcos, in particular, invested $27 billion in broadband infrastructure in 2011 and about $640 billion in total since 1996.
Out of the telco, cable and wireless provider segments, traditional wireline telcos invested the largest portion of capital in 2011: 41 percent, slightly surpassing the 40 percent for wireless and 19 percent for cable.
Supporting these initiatives will be the continual buildout of high-speed wireline access and fiber core networks. Since 2000, these networks have grown from the equivalent of 8.3 million DVDs per month to over 1.4 billion DVDs a month in 2010, a figure that USTelecom argues will triple by 2016.
The dominant source of traffic that's driving bandwidth demand is consumer video services over fixed networks. Consumer video over fixed networks accounted for over two-thirds of U.S. data traffic in 2010 and will make three-quarters of the traffic mix in the next five years. Interestingly, almost all of the U.S. wireless data traffic, the fastest data traffic segment, uses wireline network connections from wholesale operators that provide fiber and copper connections to their base station and related Mobile Switching Center (MSC) network infrastructure.