They discuss the trend of continued growth in throughput in the process of upgrading access networks and the task of assessing the traffic created by users. The correlation between the amount of generated traffic and the necessary bandwidth of the elements of a telecommunication system, which provides specified indicators of the quality of service delivery, was well studied in the era of the dominance of telegraphy and telephony. As data and video were included in the load of telecommunication networks supporting interactive services, a number of new tasks arose that required a revision of a number of provisions of the theory of teletraffic. The article analyzes the evolution trends of access networks from the point of view of increasing its throughput and provides the results of studies aimed at evaluating the parameters of packet traffic.