The relentless pursuit of growth and productivity creates new service opportunities for the organizations who build and operate networks:
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) delivering extraordinary 5G and fixed broadband services at massive scales to consumers and enterprise; cloud service providers rewiring the economics of IT and the applications used for work and play; and a multitude of verticals whose modernization projects are the very definition of Industry 4.0.
The demands of these services on networks has never been greater nor more different. Yet the underlying IP and optical systems at the heart of modern infrastructure are expected to perform and work non-stop; there is no rest, no time off for good behavior. In the digital world everything must work all the time because lives and livelihoods are on the line.
Networks that interconnect “things” must adapt to how those “things” evolve
Growth in the use of residential broadband, 5G mobile, clouds, and industrial digitalization is placing a greater burden on networks than they’ve ever had to manage before. Instead of struggling under the load, networks must be built to accommodate this new normal.
Residential Broadband: The COVID-19 pandemic made visible the vital importance of networks generally and residential broadband Internet services in particular. With ‘shelter in- place’ and ‘work-from-home’ mandates instituted throughout the world, traffic originating from fixed networks grew 30 to 50 percent, a full year’s worth in just a couple of weeks.
5G Mobile: A decade of 5G innovations will bring an expanded portfolio of mobile and wireless services to market. 5G brings broadband performance to mobile devices, for example, and opens up new opportunities for industrial wireless applications and the Internet of Things (IoT). To deliver them with agility and flexibility, radio access network (RAN) and mobile core technologies are migrating to cloud architectures and adopting virtualized, end-to-end ‘network slices’ to partition resources as needed. Fronthaul is a particular challenge for mmWave radios. They require massive capacity, ultra-low latency, and precise timing and synchronization. The roadmaps for new 5G capabilities are deep and will be rolled out over many years. Suffice it to say, the impact on IP and optical networks are significant.
Cloud Migration: The confluence of cloud computing, the global Internet and ubiquitous broadband may well be considered the 8th Wonder of the World. Enterprise IT migration to public clouds and the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) models are growing rapidly. Compared with residential CDNs, however, they have a long way to go in terms of market penetration and network deployments. But they will catch up quickly: witness the rapid adoption of SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Zoom during the pandemic.
Industrial digitalization: This “Automation of Everything” era promises to unlock trillions of dollars of economic value in the next decade by driving massive improvements in productivity for physical, asset-intensive industries that will enhance the quality of life in safer, healthier and more sustainable communities. As smart devices and systems proliferate and business applications evolve, networks will require dramatically more bandwidth to deliver richer information about the state of systems and the operating environment. Further, as business-critical applications extend to industrial automation and real-time asset coordination, they will demand latency that is orders of magnitude lower than required for today’s simpler applications.
Core values at the heart of critical networks
Our customers believe networks are a critical asset. We agree: quality networks are a core building block of our society. At their heart is the IP and optical network through which consumer, business, and industrial traffic is routed and transported. The increasingly unpredictable demands placed upon the network directly fuels the essential and complex task of designing a network architecture built to perform, protect and last.
When society and industries depend on networks to keep the world going, designing an IP and optical network should focus on three things:
-
Scalable and assured network performance engineers can count on
Assuring performance at scale means networks can be engineered according to strict rules and policies that will stand up in all service combinations and usage circumstances.
-
Robust and secure network infrastructure your operations can trust
As network capacities scale and perimeters expand, so too increases the day-to-day challenge of operating high availability networks. More network means a larger attack surface, more optical fiber in the ground and all the other issues that come with controlling networking assets distributed over wide areas and in hostile environments.
-
Efficient and programmable network architecture your business can build on, again and again
An efficient and programmable network means investing in a solution that will last and allow countless software updates. By reconfiguring your existing network anytime, your business can experiment, enter and grow into attractive new segments, offer new services and support new requirements as they arise.
Our customers’ networks keep the world going
Decades of unwavering focus solving the tough challenges of critical networks has produced deep technologies and expertise to guide our customers. We strive to be objective and present a balanced insight in and across IP and optical networking systems. When you have proven yourselves with key projects, customers trust you with more. That is our business: delivering quality networking systems today and a deep roadmap of innovations tomorrow. Learn more about the critical networks that keep our world going by clicking here.
