"Bandwidth has become the soft rib of optical communication", Wei Leping, Director of China Telecom's Technology Commission said at the 2017 Optical Information and Network Conference held recently.
The source of the bandwidth problem lies in video. Video traffic has become dominant among the network traffic, and the percentage of video traffic in Internet traffic, Cisco estimates, will climb to 82 percent in 2020 from 70 percent in 2015 globally, of which the growth rate will surpass that of the total traffic.
Similarly, the video traffic from the user side has accounted for 60 percent in China due to the Chinese operators building a large amount of CDN and realizing traffic localization.
Video service has been made the basic service for the global operators. IPTV, the main carrier of the current video services, for instance, has grown explosively in 2016, gaining almost 100 million users in China, and become the main driving force toward the explosive rise of FTTH. Mr. Wei thought that video services may be the greatest success among the shifted services for the telecom operators.
However, the video services also brought challengers to the operators. Mr. Wei noted, "The big video services require stricter network performance, showing new signs of stress."