If you’ve seen the video clips on YouTube’s website of the dog rolling around on a laptop computer, you’re one of the people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily.
Besides viewing and downloading videos, you might be downloading new songs, checking your favorite beach Webcam or playing video games online.
All that data-heavy entertainment on the Internet has almost completely filled up the network pipes that carry data traffic in the United States, analysts say. That’s good news for Colorado communication companies like Time Warner Telecom in Douglas County, Qwest Communications in Denver and Level 3 Communications in Broomfield.
For competitive reasons, the three are secretive about how close they are to capacity. But in general, existing Internet networks across the country are about 70 percent to 90 percent full, said Tim Stronge, an analyst at TeleGeography, an industry research firm in Washington, D.C.
“Obviously, with this kind of demand, people want things streaming onto the (Internet),” said Bob Meldrum, a spokesman for Internet network company Time Warner Telecom. “This is all going to create an insatiable demand for bandwidth.”
Bandwidth refers to the size of existing fiber-optic lines and their ability to carry all the data traffic customers want to send.
Time Warner Telecom had 20,928 fiber route miles at the end of the first quarter of 2006, or capacity for its business customers to send 5,100 four-minute audio or video files at the same moment, Meldrum said.
Level 3, which has bet heavily on fiber-optic infrastructure in the last decade, is also poised to cash in on the skyrocketing Internet entertainment trend.
“Significant new investment is going to be required, and we believe that Level 3 is best positioned to most efficiently deploy that new capacity,” Level 3 chief executive Jim Crowe told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in May.
After years of bandwidth “glut,” a potential shortage is looming, Crowe said. The commercial provider has 36,000 route miles of fiber after buying five regional data networks around the country for close to $2 billion since October. It has huge customers in the cable and Internet industries, including Yahoo and America Online.
In coming months, the two companies and Qwest, which has 138,000 fiber route miles worldwide, are expected to see a rapid increase in volume and revenues as more business and residential customers clamor for higher Internet speeds, said Dan Golding, an analyst at Tier 1 Research in New York. He does not predict an increase in price at the moment.
Companies also have thousands of miles of “dark fiber” – buried fiber-optic cable that has not been used – in the ground that can be put to use by adding the switch technology, Stronge said. Time Warner Telecom, Level 3 and Qwest all declined to say how much “dark fiber” they own.
Internet speeds also depend on things like compression of big video and audio files. And network companies measure their success in terms of how many buildings they serve in big cities.
Staff writer Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503 or bpotter@denverpost.com.
