ISE Magazine, January 2019

JANUARY 2019 WWW ISEMAG COM 29 TRENDS in terms of speed Like most of us the 768k DSL home connection I had at the time is nothing like the 100Mbps connection I currently enjoy According to the FCC there were only about 2 million Internet connections at the end of 1999 with the dominant way of accessing the Internet being 56kbps dial up services 58 Only a small amount 18 connected with ADSL services ranging from 128kbps up to a whopping 15Mbps The FCC now reports that we have broadband service 25Mbps or greater download speed available to over 92 of all Americans and it is not uncommon for consumers to have 100Mbps 250Mbps or even 1Gbps connections Another difference You probably were limited on where you could use your computer most likely because you had to plug it in to use the Internet even if it was a laptop as Wi Fi products were only starting to be released 20 years ago As I write this today I dont even have an Ethernet port on my MacBook and cant even think of the last time I couldnt get Wi Fi somehow Wireless connections have clearly become the preferred way for all of us to connect our devices 2019 Expectations While reflecting on the past can be entertaining and sometimes comical I would like to turn our attention to the future and what we should expect to see over the coming years Obvious or not every one of the comparisons I have made here all have driven by or been enabled by the telecommunications industry That symbiotic relationship between the industry and consumer demand will certainly continue As I look at the future I believe there will be 3 principal drivers of network evolution for our industry Capacity Demands Real Time Applications and 5G DRIVER 1 CAPACITY DEMANDS End users continually increasing capacity demands should come as no surprise to anyone whether they are in this industry or not We have seen Internet traffic grow at an exponential rate driven by content consumption and additional users coming online While the developed world no longer has an abundance of new Internet users connecting the traffic growth will continue Television is shifting rapidly from the old Cable Satellite model to one of on demand content As more and more users start to consume video content purely on their Internet connection the networks will experience some of the highest capacity strains ever Additionally Cloud services are becoming increasingly more common According to Gartner the worldwide public Cloud services market is projected to grow by nearly 50 over the next 2 years Cloud based services are dependent on the pathway to the Cloud Without a good connection Clouds dont work All of that video and Cloud growth will translate into tremendous network demands for all of us in both network access capacity and backbone congestion management Copper technologies like xDSL or G fast will have very limited use cases and should only be deployed surgically with an understanding that they are shorter term solutions In the end fiber will be required Every effort to get fiber deeper and more densely deployed will lead to better ability to handle the Engineer turning up a new 100G service