Although slowed by a lagging economy, enterprise customers nevertheless are
starting to show increased demand for broadband, but they are also showing a
marked preference for digital-subscriber-line technologies, according to a
recent survey by In-Stat/MDR (a sister company to Multichannel News).
The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based telecommunications-research group's survey of
main-campus and branch-office managers indicated that use of broadband is likely
to increase in the coming years, particularly the use of DSL technologies.
But it also projected that usage may be confined to nonessential applications
in remote branch officers or for home-office workers.
For main offices and large corporate campuses, the need for greater bandwidth
and the largely negative perception of broadband services led them to prefer
dedicated lines and Internet connections over distributed technologies offered
by cable and telecommunications providers.
About 70 percent of the managers indicated that security and hosted or
accessible applications were the key drivers. The survey found that 20 percent
of large companies wouldn't choose a broadband connection for main office
locations.
Nevertheless, of those managers willing to look at distributed broadband,
they appeared more willing to try DSL, with some 37 percent indicating that it
was the preferred broadband connection over cable and fixed-wireless options.
For managers at branch locations, that percentage rose to 42 percent.
Enterprise bandwidth is driven primarily by exchange of internal content
between employees or from employees to company clients, the study found.
'However, the manner in which this content is exchanged has begun to evolve,
becoming more Web-intensive,' noted Kneko Burney, director of business
infrastructure and services research for In-Stat/MDR.
'This has led to a marked increase in internally managed applications hosting
and, subsequently, security requirements -- two of today's most influential
application-specific drivers of enterprise bandwidth in this changed economy,'
he added.
