Most of the innovative technologies coming to revolutionize networking capabilities are driven by the enormous growth in data consumption and the resulting demand for bandwidth on networks.
Bandwidth requirements are increasing at a blinding pace. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2016 will see global IP traffic exceed the rate of 1 zettabyte per year, and reach double that by 2019.
A Zettabyte is the equivalent of one billion terabytes or 1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes of data. The source also said that 62 percent of internet traffic in 2019 will be driven by content delivery networks, as global fixed broadband speeds more than double the Mbps rate from 2014.
With all of these changes in internet bandwidth demand, telecom infrastructure models can’t afford to stay stagnant. This new thirst for bandwidth will demand flexible, dynamic business concepts compatible with software defined networking. One of the innovation-driven answers is “bandwidth on demand,” and it will parallel the growing amounts of bandwidth that companies and consumers alike come to expect.
AT&T is one example of a major company taking the lead when it comes to virtualization. Last November, SDXCentral quoted the company’s vice president of packet-optical networks, John Medamama, on the company’s expansion to a software-focused approach to deployment.
“Our mobile Internet has seen 100,000 percent growth in traffic from 2007 to 2014 and is going to grow another 10x by 2020,” Medamama said in his GEN15 keynote address. “The traditional model where we all deployed a lot of hardware-centric networks — that model is not going to sustain. We need to move to a software-centric model.”
According to Cisco’s “Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2014-2019,” global cloud IP traffic will more than quadruple from 2014 to
2019 at a CAGR of 33 percent. The Cisco study also says that global data center IP traffic will grow
threefold over the next five years, growing at a CAGR of 25 percent until 2019.
An estimated one-third of the world's population is online now, a proportion that is sure to grow. More users, more devices that connect to networks, and more data-heavy services to ride over the pipes are causing a “bandwidth explosion,” said John D’Ambrosia, who is also chairman of the Ethernet Alliance industry group and an engineering executive at Dell.
All of the bandwidth-related technologies that will become more critical during this time are going to center around the crucial question of managing services under this new model.
CloudSmartz knows the elements of this coming revolution and can help companies prepare. Be sure to visit our blog again for more information as we continue to cover this topic.