Does Internet of Things Disrupt Residential Bandwidth Consumption?

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect smart devices communicating and collaborating while providing a wide range of services. Fixed-access Internet traffic grows globally for many reasons such as increasing number of connected devices, and the number of people who utilize the Internet. IoT, video streaming, 4K technology, and virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) are some applications and services that have the major impact on Internet traffic. Many research and industry communities believe that the Internet of things (IoT) will be the top driver of bandwidth of fixed-access Internet in the future. In this paper, we compare IoT's impact with other bandwidth drivers such as video streaming, 4K technology, and VR/AR, and we investigate whether or not IoT will have a disruptive impact on the residential bandwidth in the near future. We design our model to forecast the residential Internet bandwidth by 2021 and measure the contribution of IoT to this projection. Our model includes all possible types of households and their bandwidth consumption behaviors. Our results show that video entertainment with 4K technology along with VR/AR will be the top drivers of future bandwidth, while IoT will be of least impact among them. Our model shows that 50% of households will require ≤ 78 Mbps, and 62% of households will require < 100 Mbps, meaning 12% of households will require between 78 and 100 Mbps. Furthermore, only 10% of households will demand more than 300 Mbps by 2021, and nearly half of them will use more than 500 Mbps.