The boundaries between networks are disappearing, according to Andreas Rüsseler, head of marketing for the cabling specialist R&M.
“Local data networks in companies, data center networks, cellular phone networks, wide-area networks, and access networks will barely be considered as separate units in future,” Rüsseler said.
“Data traffic between all areas is assuming such huge proportions that we need to develop an entirely new and holistic understanding of networking. We need to ensure there are no longer any bottlenecks between workstations, smartphones, cellular phone antennae, data centers, the cloud, the Internet of Things, WLAN, intelligent houses, networked cars and machines. This is the only way for smart cities to function successfully."
R&M, a Swiss developer of cabling systems for high-end network infrastructures, therefore expects the significant rise in demand for broadband solutions to continue. “The trend is towards a gigabit society. Leading agglomerations and countries will take this path in the medium term and carry out corresponding network installations,” Rüsseler predicted.
R&M is seeing this confirmed in market studies and forecasts. Experts at the cloud service provider NetApp already fear that it may soon no longer be possible to transport the data volumes required.
Edge data centers can be used to avoid latency and ensure on-site local data availability. Financial companies also need decentralized solutions so that protocols for secure transactions are available more quickly.
According to Cisco, mobile data traffic will reach a magnitude of around 50 exabytes per month by 2021. Billions of mobile end devices are already permanently connected to the internet.
“It’s mainly videos that are being transferred. Users expect uninterrupted streaming of HD images wherever possible. This trend places high demands on the transfer capacity of even the remotest of cellular phone antennas,” Rüsseler said.
“Higher-performance fiber optic cables to base stations are required in backhaul. With the introduction of the 5G standard, demand for highly reliable connectivity is set to rise over the next few years.”
Data centers and service providers will have to scale their resources at the same time, in order for dynamic data traffic to continue to flow smoothly.
“This example shows how everything is interconnected. Bandwidth and connectivity demand must be considered in depth right now – from terminals via POPs to the data center, and from the fiber optic infrastructure out in the field to the connectors in the racks of a hyperscale data center,” said Rüsseler.
First published in Networks Asia