The byte balance

Way back in February, I bemoaned the final death throes of Cable & Wireless – the network’s final incarnation being to provide backhaul capacity for Vodafone.  One of the lessons of this story was that, notwithstanding all the excitement surrounding the emergence of 4G, these new broadband services increasingly come to rely on the availability of high capacity fixed networks for their transmission.  I was reminded of this point by a throw-away fact in Ofcom’s recent update of its Infrastructure Report.  The associated headline for this document is that ‘Ofcom unveils plans to avoid mobile ‘capacity crunch’, and it is mostly concerned with the release of new mobile spectrum.  However, tucked away in Section 7 of the Report is the noteworthy fact that: “460PB of data went through the fixed networks in June 2012 compared to 19PB of data on mobile networks”.  (I didn’t know either but a petabyte (PB) is apparently around one million gigabytes).  So there you have it: on the basis of Ofcom’s June sample, the volume of data flowing on fixed lines is roughly 24-times that of the mobile network.  You heard it here first…