The Future Network in 5 Step

The Future of Networks in 5 Steps

There will be one network:
Wireless and Wireline networks will have converged to form a single, high performance, cost-optimized aggregation and core IP network, with either wireless or wired edges. In fact, even the distinction between the wireless and wired edge connectivity will be blurred as devices embed Ethernet ports, Wifi and LTE modems. So you will no longer even think about connectivity; the device and network will connect you to whatever network best suits your application and mobility needs at each instant in time. In many ways, lightRadio™ is a prime example of this trend: the ‘wired’ IP, optical and access networks are used to connect small wireless radios. Furthermore, increasingly the network will connect the radios to a central pool of control and processing elements situated back in the operator switching and data centers, allowing optimal sharing and re-use between wireless cells and access points, thereby achieving up to a 50% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings over today’s architectures.


The network will be intelligent:
As Moore’s law continues its seemingly inexorable progression, the cost of processing and the associated memory and storage will have decreased to the point where the economics of embedding application-level functionality in the network makes sense. This will allow much more efficient use of network resources, and a concomitant improvement in the user Quality of Experience (QoE)


The network will be open and sustainable:
The traditional service provider applications (voice, data and TV/video) are opening up to allow third-party and ‘web’ application developers to leverage these capabilities and ‘mash them up’ with other web services to create previously unimaginable new applications.We are already seeing this trend with the emergence of applications such as gaming and on-line video delivery leveraging the quality of service (QoS) parameters in the network to deliver the desired user experience.


The network will be a platform:
Think of a PC today: there is a processor, some memory and storage (a hard drive), and Ethernet ports, all connected by an internal communications network (e.g. the PCI and memory busses). if we consider that with the emergence of Cloud computing, processing and storage are separated into pools of resources connected together by Ethernet ports on local area networks in data centers, which in turn are connected together over the wider telecommunications network, the parallels are clear and we can think of the applications increasingly running in the network


The network will be green:
If we look to the more than 30x growth in capacity that is predicted to occur as smart devices and tablets proliferate over the coming years, and person-to-person communications are usurped (in volume) by Machine-to-Machine communications, we must optimize the energy cost per bit in order that the environmental impact of building these networks is minimized and the operational cost of running them does not become prohibitive. we are seeing a real focus on the energy costs of networks.Importantly, this is a problem that transcends a single vendor or a single operator and is the reason that we founded the GreenTouch™ consortium to tackle this massive problem via an open collaboration across the telecommunications industry.