The increase of broadband access in the world has been one of the main drivers behind the growth of rich media content deployment, which in turn, fueled the demand for content delivery solutions. At the end of 2008, about a quarter of the population of the G7 countries had access to broadband, according to an OECD report.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan Global Content Delivery Networks Market – Investment Analysis, reveals that this market earned revenues of $725.0 million in 2007 and estimates this to reach $2.6 billion mark by 2012.

“The cumulative effect of factors such as “rich-media” files across verticals, coupled with enhanced broadband penetration are reflected in strong market expansion, with revenues for the world CDN market projected to grow at a CAGR of 31 percent, during the period 2007 to 2012,” notes Frost & Sullivan Financial Analyst Swarna Pasupathi. “Trends indicate an increase in demand for higher quality content distribution. “The increased deployment of ‘rich-media content across entertainment, media, and enterprise verticals is the key contributing factor to the overall growth of the video CDN market.”

According to a report published by the Yankee Group in June 2009 (Finding Customer Value at the Intersection of Carriers and Content Delivery), as enterprises publish and distribute more and more high-value and high-volume content online, the need for a dedicated content delivery network (CDN) continues to crystallize.

Enterprises must be able to efficiently distribute, manage and monetize online content.
On the marketing side, decreased dollars mean that your Web site must be more effective and online assets must pay discernible dividends in terms of furthering the brand (if not generating direct revenue). On the IT side, fewer resources mean it is critical to maximize those resources that you do have.

For companies that are distributing any meaningful amount of content online today, the level of capital expense, service commitment and length of time to reach an ROI make the concept of an internally developed CDN impractical.

Employing an external CDN solution enables enterprises to “scale as you grow,” relying on a cloud-based service to provide the tools to ramp capacity as site traffic and content popularity dictate. This is particularly significant for large enterprises that strive for international reach because a third-party CDN solution will already have the infrastructure in place to distribute content to eyeballs around the globe.

Tata Commmunications, with the farthest reaching Tier-1 IP network coupled with an innovative CDN solution, is well positioned to fill this position and distribute high quality media content to all the regions of the world.

One of the key drivers for enterprise VoIP services is the tremendous flexibility it delivers in terms of incorporating users into the network. Globally distributed employees in remote offices, home offices, or no fixed offices can all take advantage of the same communication systems as a desk worker in the corporate headquarters.

Enterprise VoIP systems generally run over a private network leveraging some combination of MPLS, IPSec and SSL to handle within-company communications. However, carrier still have a strong role to play in enabling private on-net to off-net communications.

Currently, carriers typically terminate off-net enterprise VoIP calls into the traditional TDM network, even if they are destined for another private VoIP network. However, as users become accustomed to the richer functionality of in-house converged communication solutions, carriers can expect to see demand increase for more sophisticated, IP-based services that leverage converged IP transport layer between networks.

Carriers should expect to see intense discussions around interworking and standards for converged communications services as IP-based interconnections continue to increase. Next week, I’ll be talking about how these issues play out in the specific case of Telepresence.

Videoconferencing services have been touted as the “next big thing” for a decade or more, but poor video quality and time lags have hampered uptake. However, the latest generation of videoconferencing services, known as Telepresence, take advantage of class-of-service capabilities on MPLS networks to deliver high-definition video and audio, life size and in real time.

The first-generation uptake on Telepresence has largely been for within-organization collaboration at large multinationals. However, as companies look to improve ROI on their investments in dedicated Telepresence rooms, one of the key demands emerging is for interconnection for Telepresence services running on different networks. With interworking enabled, organizations can expand their internal Telepresence community of users to include customers, suppliers, and business partners, further increasing utilization rates for their Telepresence rooms.

The i3 Forum is planning to discuss how carriers will support interconnection between private Telepresence rooms on different networks. Since classes of service are required to support the service, interconnection over the public Internet isn’t an option – this is where some of the emerging standards such as IPX will become increasingly important.

The theme of the 40th International Institute of Communications (IIC) conference in Montreal this week was “Wrestling with unpredictability in Global Communications”. The panel I had the pleasure to be part of was under the motto : “Broadband futures”. One of the questions addressed to me: Should we be concerned about a shortage of IP addresses as more people use broadband networks for more things? My answer was predictable, at least to me.

A more fundamental question we all wrestle with however is to qualify and quantify the broadband evolution over a five year horizon. We find two major schools of thought: one sees complete mobile or at least wireless dominance, the other a happy coexistence between mobile and Fibre To The Home or somewhere near. All seem to agree on video dominance in the consumption of bandwidth and on traffic projections growing exponentially over the next five years. The updated Cisco VNI study unveiled at Supercomm last week and presented also at IIC abounds in the same direction. Their projections show hyperconnectivity and 56 exabytes per month sloshing through the internet by 2013 including around 2.2 exabytes of mobile internet and the zettabyte era in sight.

The Arbor presentation at the NANOG meeting in Dearborn provided another interesting set of facts to consider when pondering the future: the growing concentration of the content, applications and internet transport and the blurring between ISP’s, CDN’s, content and application providers, giving birth to hypergiants. Out of around 35000 networks, 150 of them now amount for more than 50% of the internet traffic and companies such as Google and Comcast, absent in the 2007 top 10, are now part of them.

The phenomenal growth of mobile data now has some major cellular networks bursting at the seams and is leading to a major surge in investments. The latest GSM data shows that 42 carriers in 21 countries are now committed to LTE deployment, up 35% from six months ago. Better to keep things in perspective and a degree of vigilance however, as illustrated by the disappointment of the latest quarter of 3G penetration and iPhones sales in China. A reminder of the unhappy relationship between forecasts and unpredictability.

No wonder that predicting the speed of transition to IPv6 remains a divinatory art even if it is predictable that we are about to run out of IPv4 addresses.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.