The most notable and surprising trend I noticed in 2015 was that broadband bandwidth consumption appears to be outpacing Moore’s Law, by a long shot. The increase of our own customers’ usage was immense: Their bandwidth consumption more or less doubled for New York City in 2015, and that follows a doubling in 2014.
I have not seen this kind of growth prior to the last few years, and most other experts and executives didn’t foresee it either; industry analyst predictions have generally predicted a doubling like this every two to three years as opposed to every year.
This jump in demand could very well stem from larger trends: an increase in high-tech companies opening offices in New York City, a sign of more companies moving their services to the cloud, and a heavy focus on streaming video, among other factors. It’ll really be fascinating to see if this trend continues, slows down, or accelerates in New York City—and also to see how it compares to the rest of the country, especially other tech-centric cities like San Francisco.
[Editor’s note: To tap the wisdom of our distinguished group of Xconomists, we asked a few of them to answer a question heading into 2016: “What was the biggest advance or most surprising development of 2015?” You can see other questions and answers here.]
