Decreased spending could hurt the public Internet, says Ovum

It's no secret that service providers are being more cautious with capex spending, but Ovum Research thinks that this trend could potentially come at the cost of degrading the performance of the public Internet. At issue is the threshold carriers use to purchase new routers and switches to increase network capacity. According to a story in Telephony, service providers typically run their networks at 40 to 50 percent capacity, and they can run at 60 to 70 percent of capacity without issue, but when they reach 80 percent, carriers should purchase additional routing and switching gear.

And while John Mazur, principal analyst for Network Infrastructure at Ovum, reports that service providers have reduced their capex spending on routers and switches by 20 percent in Q1 09, IP traffic continues to grow. By 2013, Cisco's Virtual Networking Index reports that Internet traffic will grow to 667 exabytes. While service providers are not going let traffic spikes degrade their premium business services, ongoing traffic spikes could degrade the performance of best effort Internet services.

For more:
- Telephony has this report

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