Peter Fetterolf's paper investigates the evolving trends and forecasts aggregation network traffic across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions for the next five years. Video entertainment and emerging augmented/virtual reality devices such as the Apple Vision Pro are key drivers of broadband demand and this paper analyzes application traffic distributions and video resolution data rates to predict future demands on aggregation networks. We expect video and other VR devices will primarily drive traffic in rural and metro aggregation networks. Core national and international networks typically carry less video traffic because it is typically cached in regional data centers.

The analysis shows that aggregation network capacity requirements will grow from 100Gbps in 2023 to 400 Gbps in 2027 in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.