Now, service providers are converging their independent networks onto single, next-generation IP networks that allow applications to be decoupled from the underlying network. A new focus on middleware is emerging, specifically Web services, that link the networks’ communications capabilities to applications in a way that can be mixed and matched to quickly create interconnections among all related services.
While software companies will contribute functions to that middleware, much of the real value will come from the telecom industry itself. Nortel, for example, will provide the realtime capabilities and network-oriented functions, such as location, presence, proximity, and identity that will make the new applications “network aware” and the networks more “applications aware.”
True Broadband
The third major trend, true broadband, is most exciting and ties closely to the first two. True broadband will be achieved when awareness of the underlying technology disappears from everyone’s communications experience. The leap in convenience will even be far greater than when we evolved from the slow, monotony of dial-up connections to instant always-on access.
Granted, wireline infrastructures already provide the speed and bandwidth for super-fast Web surfing and running video, but when you take that same experience and jump onto a device using a cellular network, it becomes much slower and degraded. This is because the entire end-to-end cellular ecosystem wasn’t really designed to support huge bandwidth demands. Current 3G systems, for example, were engineered to optimize voice and some rudimentary data, but not to handle more advanced applications like mobile video and IPTV.
The time is now at hand for developing new technologies capable of extending broadband to the mobile environment. To do this, mobile access networks must be upgraded and the network core readied to scale for capacity and operational simplicity.
Seamless mobility is the final key to achieving a true broadband experience eliminating boundaries between fixed and mobile worlds, networks and devices.
4G
In terms of mobile access, this gets back to 4G. 4G represents an order of magnitude increase in network performance (five to 10 times greater). It also provides a lower total cost of ownership and enables a new class of connected devices, delivering on the vision of the hyper-connected world mentioned earlier.
"If you think about this next-generation of the communications experience, the problems that you have to solve are not in a single domain. Companies that have the
potential to solve them must understand wireless and wireline."
Richard Lowe
President
Mobility and Converged Core Networks, Nortel
