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The Network In 2020: Faster, Closer, Smarter

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Steve Alexander

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It’s no secret that in today’s world of connected everywhere with smart everything, always-on internet of ample speed is a must. What many don’t fully appreciate is that achieving faster speeds is only part of the equation.

In the future, it will be just as important for the internet to be able to bring the cloud close to us as our online experiences become more and more reliant on rapid, real-time interactions. Response sensitivity to how quickly we can interact with the cloud (what network engineers refer to as "latency") is going to determine the quality of our user experience as much as our internet connection speed does.

Keeping up with expanding user expectations depends heavily on the underlying network and its ability to adapt to changing user demands. Internet demand continues to surge across the globe. For example, a 2019 Pew Research report found today’s smartphone and mobile data penetration rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed to 96% among all adults, up from just 35% in 2011.

In order to meet these increases, the network needs to be able to support surges in traffic, anticipate and counteract network congestion, and adapt to meet the performance and speed required by new applications and services.

Looking ahead, I believe there are three key requirements of the network in 2020: It needs to be faster, closer and smarter.

Faster Connectivity 

2020 is a web-scale world. On-demand content, bandwidth-hungry mobile apps, IoT devices, and new cloud-based applications are driving the need for more bandwidth and network capacity. Higher raw data rates are needed to support the move to streaming 4K video content, cloud migration of large datasets and the real-time communication demands of today’s fastest servers.

It wasn’t that long ago that a network edge was best described as “fast Ethernet,” with speeds provisioned at 100Mbps, which are typical in a local area network. The move to 4G-LTE saw rates increase to at least 1Gbps, and already, there are demands for edge rates of 25Gbps and above to cell towers enabling. To address this, there have been recent public announcements of 400G services from tier-one service providers like AT&T.

Since its inception, the internet has been a catalyst for service providers to facilitate faster connectivity, an imperative that will increase over time.

Bringing Networking Closer To The Edge 

Alongside faster connectivity, low latency will be a key enabler for the success of next-generation applications and services. Take cloud gaming as just one example. The real-time, interactive nature of gaming relies on data from sessions processed by servers located some distance away from players. This enables shared experiences and creates an arena for massive multiplayer games while also subjecting gamers to experience all the other activities the network is supporting. If there is network congestion or delay and gamers aren't allowed to counter a massive zombie attack or don’t see a critical Easter egg because of latency, service providers will have a lot of unhappy gamers on their hands!

The network demands get even more stringent for immersive cloud-gaming. New interactive services, real-time IoT communications and AR/VR are all set to challenge our definitions of low latency, making it even harder to deliver on the quality of experience that users expect.

By having the network edge bring the cloud closer to the user, connectivity, processing power, and storage for high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive apps can all be efficiently applied before the traffic hits areas of major congestion or delay. And thus, by bringing the cloud closer, operators are able to improve the user experience.

Smarter Thanks To Automated Intelligence 

In 2020, the network will become smarter and even more software-centric. Inevitably, as network connectivity is improved and continuously scaled out, there will be a growing element of complexity.

Think about the telephone. A phone started with low complexity capabilities, and the device itself was simple to operate. However, as more features were developed and introduced, more user difficulties started popping up for doing something as simple as forwarding a voicemail.

Today’s smartphones have thousands of times more capabilities, yet they are equipped with user interfaces that are simple enough for a child to master. Software intelligence has been able to mask inherent complexity, and the same will become more and more true of the network. Intelligent software will be the tool that breaks the lock-step relationship between network capability, operational complexity and cost. For the first time, we can envision networks becoming more complex yet simpler and less costly to operate.

Next-generation applications, and the emergence of 5G, pose both a challenge and an opportunity for network providers. Beginning the transition to a network infrastructure that utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning and software analytics will allow the network to anticipate end user demands and adjust without human interaction.

As network demands continue to rapidly increase and expand in nature, more innovative and creative solutions are being introduced to combat latency and congestion. With the influx of dynamic, flexible new architectures, 2020 and beyond will see the advent of profound capabilities, designed to elevate user experiences and interconnectedness to new levels.

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