Bandwidth spawning growth of online video--Systimax

MANILA, Philippines -- As video over the Internet moves from YouTube to corporate boardrooms, it is seen to drive investment growth in data centers everywhere.

So is video the so-called killer application that takes advantage of explosion in Internet bandwidth? Mattias Peluffo, vice president for global technical support for cabling vendor Systimax, thinks so.

"It is clearly improving today's communications," Peluffo said in an interview during a recent press briefing held in Cairns, Australia.

The amount of video on YouTube alone -- and the number of people that access them – is already phenomenal. YouTube experiences 100 million video streams a day, Peluffo said.

Video is also becoming a business application in itself. Cisco Systems and HP recently introduced videoconferencing solutions -- called Telepresence and Halo, respectively -- that make use of the 1080p high-definition standard.

"High-res video is the killer application," said Peluffo, who also spearheads Systimax's thrust to new standards for transmitting data at faster speeds via copper and fiber cables.

He added: "Video resolution is increasing. In Japan, for example, broadcast station NHK is already working on ultra high definition, which is roughly 16 times better than 1080p."

Video eats up a lot bandwidth and thus, end-users are forced to invest in technology that allows their data centers to adapt to this trend.

Based on Systimax' projections, the market for structured cabling alone would amount to $1.5 billion by 2010.

A third of that will be spent upgrading old copper cables as end-users begin deploying IP-based networks, according to Dr. Ispran Kandasamy, Asia Pacific vice president and managing director for Asia Pacific.

Companies are also taking the issue of network downtime more seriously, equating it to monetary losses,' Kandasamy said.

"Clearly, future growth in networking is from a data center perspective," he said, citing biggest growth markets in China and India.