Brazil: Broadband Transformation
Last week was the most important telecommunications tradeshow in Latin America – Futurecom, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Oct. 13-16. Broadband and the role new applications (mainly video) are playing in redefining the service provider market were hot topics.
Just to give a bit of perspective: in the next three to five years, Brazil will need five to seven times their current capacity – to not only accommodate additional broadband users, but also the greater use of new applications, mainly video and social media.
Accordingly to the latest results from the Cisco Visual Networking Index, the average global broadband connection (primarily residential subscribers and some business users) generates approximately 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. What does that mean in everyday terms? Per connection per day, it is roughly equivalent to downloading 3,000 text e-mails, 100 MP3 music files or 360 text-only e-books. Whoa!
Taking that one step further — the average global broadband connection uses about 4.3 gigabytes per month for visual networking applications (advanced services such as video, social networking and collaboration). Per connection per day, this amount is roughly the equivalent of approximately 20.5 short-form Internet videos or approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, whether streamed on its own, embedded in a Web page, or viewed as part of video communications.
So what does all of this mean for Brazil? These global stats and the conversations from last week really reiterate to me the enormity of the opportunities in Brazil. Imagine what will happen in the next decade with the proliferation of computers and broadband connections, and all of the people using video and social media applications to communicate, work and learn…and all of that in one the most booming economies on earth. Food for thought.
Here are some of our execs giving their perspective on Brazil and Broadband:
Carlos Dominguez, Senior VP Office of the President, from Sao Paulo, Brazil
Rodrigo Abreu, Director Cisco Brazil
Al Safarikas, Director Managed Services Cisco, Emerging Markets
Marco Barcellos, Marketing Manager Cisco Brazil
Posted by Felipe Lamus at 04:37PM PST
Aaron Oct 21, 2009
I just did the math with my roommate and we think your statistics are off. We think that if you check them again you will find that you are underestimating.
In order for 11.4 gigabytes to equal 3000 text emails you would have to have 3.8 million characters per email. (thankfully email does not usually take that much space, bandwidth ain’t free!) I think that you underestimated by about the same order of magnitude for MP3s and ebooks as well.
In general your point still stands and if anything it is strengthened by the fact that you are transferring orders of magnitude more data.