While much of the talk this year has been on managed services, the traditional banker for service providers-bandwidth-has shown continuing growth. Across the board service providers have indicated that bandwidth requirements are going up for both large and small companies.

"This last year has seen even higher bandwidth demand, more data services and 100M connections have now become Gigabit or even 10 Gigabit connections," said Michael Lee, VP, information & communications technologies, PCCW. Lee noted that many firms are upgrading or building out datacenters and require higher throughput fiber-based connections.

While SMEs may not be as advanced in their demands, they have also increased their bandwidth requirements. "At first SMEs just needed network access, basic broadband for email and Internet access," said Lee. "But now they are hosting websites and using the web as a medium for business with customers and partners."

"Bandwidth requirements are always going up as firms want to run more applications, but in many cases, companies are not making use of all the bandwidth available to them," said Eric Chan, general manager, Business Development and Planning, Hutchison Global Communications (HGC).

Chan believes that most firms could be adding new applications and use up spare bandwidth rather than simply adding more capacity. "Often the networks are not optimized for the applications which result in wasted bandwidth," said Chan.