TODAYS NETWORK: WHY IT MATTERS MORE THAN EVER

Omar Alsaied, general manager and Middle East carriers sales director at Ciena discusses how the networks of the future will need to be programmable and dynamic to handle changing user demands

What would society be without telecom networks? Imagine a world without basic Internet connectivity, email and cell phone access. If email goes down or connection to the server is severed, productivity is immediately impacted. Due to the nature of our 24/7 connected world, uninterrupted connectivity has become a given, a way of life. Should this come under any threat of disruption, we go into panic mode and ‘unchartered’ territory, where we have to find new ways to communicate and conduct our daily business.

Looking back to the end of the 1990s, one could say networking sat at the “head table” by providing the infrastructure that would connect us with each other, sustain online commerce, and bridge the haves and have-nots with both connectivity and content. But the truth was, even at the peak of the dot-com boom, many regarded network technology as just “dumb pipes” that simply served the function of moving bits from one destination to another. The hope of many in the world of technology was that the network “would not get in my way.” At its simplest, the network was viewed as the “ugly” — or at least less-intelligent — stepsister of key parallel functions of computing and storage.

When the downturn of the early 2000s hit with its unforgiving force, even that fairly simplistic (and really unfair) perception of the value of the network was undermined.  Since the promise of the networks — new services and significant ROI — was never realized, the network and carrier-network investment took a “time-out” of sorts, and perception of its role and importance regressed.

But once again we are realizing the increasingly important role of the network as it supports a growing number of applications that support a company’s business needs. The network is experiencing more pressure from growing traffic fueled by the popularity of smartphones, other mobile devices and end-users adopting new, more bandwidth-hungry services and technologies.

Over the years the network has evolved and increased its relevance in terms of user experience. A number of changes have pushed the network forward, including increasing acceptance of cloud computing; maturing carrier business models that drive greater profitability and service creation; the advancement of Ethernet as a reliable and ubiquitous technology; and perhaps as important as any, the emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) to support a growing app-crazy culture that has changed the nature of consumer-demand and expectations around the online (network) experience (thanks Apple).

With this rise of applications and the network’s role as an enabler of them, one can see how far the network has come and the potential that still lies ahead for continued innovation and development. The network has emerged as a performance-on-demand platform for applications, rather than just “pipes”, spawning and fueling companies like NetFlix and DropBox. The role of the network in these instances has been to ensure the customer experience is seamless, and it does so by managing the quality of the connection to guarantee the integrity of the application. This makes the network more important than ever before — it had to become smarter, and now it is.

The demands of our highly connected world will require even greater intelligence from the network than ever before as traffic continues to be more dynamic and unpredictable. For example, with Dubai winning the bid to host Expo2020, the city can expect to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and various network services around the event. Many organizations have already started investing more in storage technologies, server-based computing capabilities, and network virtualisation. As they invest in these technologies, organizations know that the network of the future will have to operate at a lower cost and while offering great scalability features; it’s fully programmable, offers rapid service turn-up, and is software defined and controlled; and it’s less about traditional geographic domains (like edge, metro and core) and more about functional domains (such as content servers and virtualized network resources). This network seamlessly integrates connect, compute and storage capabilities.

The network matters more than ever. With the demands of this highly connected world we live in, operators recognize the need to deploy the network of the future today. A programmable and dynamic network that is capable of handling users changing demands. So at the end of the day, users can enjoy seamless connectivity — eliminating the need to answer the question: “What do we do without the network?”