As we enter the third year of the pandemic, it has never been more clear the importance of our highly reliable, secure and scalable wireless and wireline networks allowing us to remain connected with our friends, families and co-workers. Yet we are at a unique point in our industry where new technologies and innovative applications are enabling people and businesses to thrive however time is of the essence.
#1: New players continue to join the telecom industry as traditional roles evolve
We can think about the composition of our industry much like the layers of a cake with clear distinctions and the role each plays in the market. We can consider the basic ingredients comprising of the optics, radios, antennas, fibers and of course the silicon for storage, memory, processors which are all held together with thick software “icing.” The bottom layer consists of the component vendor community that harnesses these basic ingredients into products that integrated into networking equipment. The network and compute equipment vendors harness the capabilities of each these components to construct networks for the service providers that in turn they sell to their customers.
Many of us can remember a time when operators completely owned the entire end to end service delivery, customer experience and provided a choice of renting either a beige or black phone. During this time service innovation expanded slowly and was expensive and was modulated by the will of the operator. Only after the ubiquitous availability of the Internet, where the service and the physical medium could be separated, has the network continued to become more and more decoupled with the value creation moving to the further edges of the network. Our industry continues to transform at a rapid pace to support the new ways consumers, businesses and enterprises derive value from connectivity to enable new value-added services. We are witnessing the transition of the network from being primarily technology driven with siloed organizational structures using “hard coded” processes delivering static services to one that is market driven where services can be much more granular, transient and distributed.
With this upheaval all the parts of this “cake” are changing. Service providers have gone from connectivity companies to media companies and then back to connectivity companies. Semiconductor, optical, and radio component vendors are seeking larger roles in this “cake.” Taking advantage of Moore’s Law, data center compute vendors are providing more functionality and capabilities. This has enabled companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google to build ever increasing compute capabilities initially for regional datacenters expanding to edge and on-premise compute nodes. All of this has enabled the democratization of services as works loads, small and large, to be seamlessly moved from one part of the network to the other.
As we look to the future, the value of the network is no longer just based on the raw performance but also on how easily functionality can be stitched together to provide the next killer application.
#2: Innovation isn’t just new ideas; it’s bringing those ideas to market
There are a lot of great ideas in our industry, but it is the application of those ideas into new products and services is where innovation happens. What is phenomenal has been the pace at which new innovations are accepted by consumers. We can look to the speed of adoption for televisions or cars and compare it today to the adoption of the internet or smart phone...it’s as clear as the separation between night and day. The ability to enable new applications and services has never been easier. As more and more workloads are brought to the cloud, companies are publishing APIs to expose the capabilities of their services. By doing so, new applications can easily be created to chain these services together to bring new value-added services to the market. This paradigm will continue to fuel the next generation of web applications however it will also fundamentally change the how operators will build, manage and monetize their infrastructure as they desire to move at the same speed as those building these applications.
But as new technologies are adopted and new services are brought to the market, one challenge is of technology and data obsolescence and security. Think DVDs, CDs, and even VHS tapes. These devices preserved the memories of graduations, weddings and the first steps of a child however many times those memories while secured on that medium are locked away from being consumed easily. The answer has been to make this data digital so that it is no longer held hostage.
As seen by the rapid adoption of smart phones, consumers are willing to pay for the next gadget or device that will makes their lives easier or add more value. With the pandemic, we are seeing technologies being adapted at an even faster pace. Already a third of all data passes through the cloud and over 90% of the world’s data has been created in just the last couple of years. The data generated globally in 2021 amounts to a mind-blowing 79.4 zettabytes per year or 2.5 quintillion (1021) bytes per day, an amount that would exceed 10 million Blu-ray discs. By 2025, the ubiquitous adoption of 5G will drive over 75 billion devices connected generating over 200 zettabytes. We need to be able to keep our data digital secure and ensure that we’re also operating with sustainability in mind.
#3: Regulatory bodies will need to keep up with the pace of innovation in the telecom industry
With innovation, also comes regulation. As seen with the insatiable desire to create and to share data and content the demand for connectivity has never been greater than before. More fiber and more spectrum are needed to serve these new opportunities and to fuel the future digital economies.
Regulatory bodies around the world evaluate new technologies and the impact they will make. For example, in the U.S., the FAA and FCC are currently working to resolve issues around available frequency bands for new 5G networks. While ensuring flight safety is absolutely critical, we also want to ensure that 5G comes to market as it is the backbone for the digitalization of industry. Regulators will continue to have to solve these challenges as new technologies such as 6G are developed however they will be faced with increase pressure from all parties to make prudent and rationale regulatory decisions on an accelerated time scale.
The demand for services and data only increases in importance to our lives and our economies. The speed at which we must bring these enabling technologies to market is only getting faster and faster. We are working with service providers to enable these new network and operational paradigms, however it we must ensure that we have a seamless transition from the existing network to the future. The decoupling of hardware and software components based on open standards architectures and published APIs is one of the first steps in this journey however we must guarantee that we address completely the challenges of reliability, security and scalability. Our industry is now a very dynamic marketplace and we as a partner with our customers will continue to help steer us all forward.
