Internet traffic in the Middle East has doubled every year since 2005 as internet connections have boomed and users developed a taste for high-bandwidth services like online video, a new study reports.
According to the findings of TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and advisory firm, global internet traffic - a measure of how much data are being sent across the world - increased 53 per cent in the 12 months to the middle of this year. In the Middle East, where the number of internet users has risen more than 1,000 per cent since 2000, traffic has surged 97 per cent a year since 2005. Only in the fast-growing economies of South Asia has traffic grown faster, at an average annual rate of 103 per cent. Even the slowest growing region of the world, North America, has increased its internet traffic by more than 50 per cent each year on average, a significant figure given the region is the world's largest consumer of internet bandwidth.
"[Global] Broadband subscriber growth has been slowing since 2001, but the volume of traffic generated by each user has grown," said Alan Mauldin, the director of research at TeleGeography. "Traffic growth is fuelled by consumer demand for video, delivered via web browsers, peer-to-peer services or streaming protocols."
The explosion in usage was enabled by a steady stream of new undersea fibre-optic cables, which carry the vast majority of the world's communications. The traffic capacity of the global communications network grew at a faster rate than the traffic itself, with bandwidth connection in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America more than doubling in the past year. Due to this growth in capacity, the world's communications infrastructure remained in relative oversupply, with less than 30 per cent of the available bandwidth being utilised, the report said. At peak usage times, this figure rises to 43 per cent, leaving comfortable room for traffic to grow. But the report warned that region-specific bottlenecks still represented a risk. Communications between North and South America grew faster than new capacity to carry them, which could lead to bandwidth challenges if the trend continues into the future.
In the Middle East, which is connected to the rest of the world by only a handful of undersea cables, the need for new capacity has long been recognised. Every major telecommunications company in the region is involved in one or more international cable projects, with more than US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn) of investment in new capacity announced last year alone.
The region was shaken by widespread internet blackouts in late January, after the simultaneous failure of two major undersea cables off Egypt's Mediterranean coast.
In the UAE, where internet penetration is the highest in the region, traffic growth comes largely from increased usage from existing subscribers. New infrastructure promising super-fast internet will only boost the already surging demand. Etisalat is working on rolling out a new state-of-the-art broadband network, extending fibre-optic cable to homes throughout the country. The system, being built in partnership with Huawei, a Chinese company, will deliver internet at speeds up to 10 times faster than the best connections currently available. The company said it expected hundreds of thousands of customers to be using the service by the end of the year.
More than 50,000 Dubai residents and businesses are using fibre-optic connections through du, the new entrant to the UAE telecommunications market. The company already uses the fibre connections to deliver television and phone services to customers.
tgara@thenational.ae