Internet traffic, limited to 5-10GB monthly

The Internet users watch more and more online video content, and this means an increased traffic, and also increased invoice values of the ones that have limitations and especially of the ones that access YouTube on the cellular phone, the experts in domain say.Due to the fact that some big operators of Internet services have removed of their offers the option “unlimited”, the access to online video could turn to be more and more expensive in the next period, the analysts say. “The Dawning of the Ultra-Broadband period” is presented by the experts inside the industry as “rationalizing” the access to Internet. The problem isn’t represented just by the increase of the traffic consumed by each user, the major problem is represented by the fact that at the moment the number of broadband users increases fast, concomitantly with the time spent online and the increased consumption of multimedia online.

Not even the illegal industry of file-sharing, that continues to exist on the Internet, it doesn’t compare as traffic volume with the video sites, the experts say. The American operator AT&T made public a few of the relevant figures: 31% of the bandwidth is used by streaming audio and video, and only 20% by the file-sharing users. The visits on regular sites represent about 40% of the total allocated band.
“Four years ago, peer-to-peer traffic would have been the largest slice of the pie, but it seems that now the online video has exceeded even the piracy”, a representative of AT&T stated. The web pages and video increased in 2008 by 76% against the similar period of last year. Per-total, the bandwidth consumption increased by 30%.

The trend from United States is also noticed in Europe, the officials outlined. For instance, the ISP companies from Germany stated that the peer-to-peer industry (file sharing) is the largest component of Internet traffic. If the current trends continue, by 2012 the online video will touch a similar report to the one from United States. Then online video will use about 50% out of the total allocated broadband.
The operators face big problems, the investments for increasing the capacity are bigger every day, on measure that the average prices have dropped against last years. T-Mobile, that recently launched the phone G1 Android of Google, has had to install in New York City more than 1,000 cell sites simply for keeping up with the traffic. Each site is worth about $200,000, an official of the company stated. The operators consider a very small number of users account for a disproportionate amount of the bandwidth consumption. A Cisco official recently stated that the top 1 percent of users consumed 225 gigabytes of data a month, compared to the bottom 50 percent of users who used 1 gigabyte of data or less. The companies want to include in the invoice mostly 5-10GB monthly, and the overflows to be charged. This model was introduced by Comcast, operator which confronts with similar broadcasting problems.  In the context of the increased interest for online video, Yahoo manages to bring a surprise. According to the most recent Nielsen research, the portal is ranked on the second world position after YouTube. If the site Google recorded about 5,3 billion  views of clips, Yahoo hardly touched 264 million.