Video drives broadband traffic confirms Calix study

Video accounted for 67 percent of downstream traffic in the broadband networks of 45 U.S. service providers during the fourth quarter of 2011, says Calix, Inc. (NYSE: CALX) in its inaugural Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report.

The report combines data collected via Calix’s Compass Flow Analyzer software product installed in the networks of customers involved in the study. The software tool tracks and reports overall traffic volumes and applications (e.g., video streaming, Internet browsing, etc.).

Video also accounts for 13 percent of upstream traffic, the report states. Large content distribution networks (CDNs) such as those of Level3, Limelight, and Akamai accounted for 80 percent of total video traffic examined in the report.

However, while significant, video’s percentage of upstream traffic only a quarter of that total generated via business services. Such services composed 57 percent of upstream traffic on the broadband networks examined.

Carriers that participated in the study use a variety of access network technologies, including GPON, point-to-point Ethernet, ADSL2+, and VDSL2. The report confirmed the benefits of an all-fiber infrastructure. Subscribers served by fiber to the premises (FTTP) networks generated more than 2.67X more downstream traffic and 1.8X more upstream traffic than those served by copper. The average FTTH-fed subscriber generated 87 GB of downstream traffic and 8.8 GB of upstream traffic.

Overall, the average broadband subscriber across the 45 networks generated 36.7 GB downstream and 5.1 GB upstream each month.

Meanwhile, the report also affirmed the truism that a relative few subscribers generate much of the traffic on broadband networks. The top 5 percent of subscribers in the U.S. networks studied used more than 100 GB of downstream traffic a month -- approximately 50 percent of Internet traffic on those networks. Overall, the networks

Calix plans to issue follow ups to this report quarterly. The current report can be accessed from the company’s website.