Supplier's Voice: The Portents of a New Era
By Richard Love, President Mobility and Converged Core Networks, Nortel
There’s no disputing the fact that the Internet and wireless networks have been catalysts for connecting people and places around the world and giving us access to information and the ability to do business and communicate like never before. Still, for all of our industry’s achievements, we have more work
ahead in bringing about the next phase in communications.
The catalyst for the new era is increasing demand for “personal broadband,” which means high-bandwidth and super-fast access with any application, regardless of the device or location. Three emerging “mega” trends underlie this and present challenges that new technologies, such as 4G, OFDM, MIMO, and IMS are designed to overcome.
Hyperconnectivity
The first trend is what Nortel refers to as hyperconnectivity. This takes all of us as individual users beyond the realm of being connected to the network. In a not-so-distant future, the number of devices and entities on the network will far surpass the number of people using the services those devices offer. Usage will then be measured not by subscribers, but by the number of devices using the network.
Even now, we are connecting millions or billions of IP-enabled devices – Blackberries, cell phones, lap tops, smart buildings, gaming systems, sensor networks, etc. – and the list is growing. Everything that can be connected soon will be. In fact, machine-oriented traffic is expected to top people-oriented traffic in only three to five years. This event will be as significant and industry altering as when data beat out network voice traffic in 2001.
You can see how this might be possible considering today’s typical enterprise, where maybe 10,000 employees are connected to the network in addition to some 20,000 to 40,000 devices. By 2010 and for mobile networks alone, Nortel estimates connections to be around five billion devices or entities.
Communications-enabled applications
A second important trend, communications enabled applications, involves the reinvention of services and applications to support new levels of network-aware intelligence and an intuitive experience via an advanced technology architecture like IMS.
We are already in the process of changing how applications are built and delivered. In the past, networks were largely single-purpose, being built and deployed to deliver a specific service such as voice, date, or mobility. The applications were then built into the products themselves.
Richard Lowe
President
Mobility and Converged Core Networks, Nortel
