Service provider, trends for 2021: ChannelCity.it

The importance of the edge is growing
Never like today networks have played a fundamental role. Companies, schools, telemedicine, social life: everything has gone from personal to virtual interaction, and interactive video calls with many participants have become a fixture of many people’s daily lives. We have seen heavy use of streaming (especially video), for example for remote staff training, and heavy use of online games, all phenomena that have led to the growth of CDNs. Service providers responded quickly to increased traffic, avoiding higher latency and decreased quality. Next year, service providers will double their edge cloud investments, to bring applications and data closer to the end user and connected devices, to further enhance the user experience, support new low-latency real-time applications, and make more efficient use of the capacity of network transit.

Network security
As far as the safety Often overshadowed by the speed of the network, the pandemic has shown that cybercrime is hoping to harness crises to its advantage. This is especially important in light of the second crash and the fact that remote working is now the new normal, opening up new opportunities for hackers. In 2021, companies will invest in ‘Enterprise-at-home’ solutions, with a view to safety, so that everyone network endpoints are protectedwherever they are. It will forever change the way service providers build and manage their networks, particularly when it comes to delivering managed services to business customers.

We need to prepare the network for the unknown by focusing on AI and ML
The pandemic has transformed the world from physical to virtual overnight, leaving service providers with the enormous responsibility of make optimal experiences available in real time or near peak traffic conditions. Traffic patterns have gone from mobility to fragmentation and the line between consumers and businesses has blurred. This means that cThere will be long-term changes in the way service providers build and manage their networks.
Next year there will be a greater focus on preparing networks for the ‘unknown’: there will be an acceleration of investment in Agile and open network architectures based on cloud principles, elastic capacity on demand and automation and security to guarantee the preset level of experience. By increasing the focus on the service experience we can expect orchestration technologies, AI / ML, insurance and automation service take on an even bigger role in service provider network operations. This can ensure quality of service and simplification of operations as network traffic increases, in light of increasingly dynamic and complex traffic patterns.

Residential and commercial networks will become a
Following the shift to telecommuting, the line between a residential broadband network and a business broadband network has become increasingly blurred. Therefore, when something goes wrong, the telecommunications company has to fix it quickly, because also a home network is now critical to business. Apart from uptime, this will become a key factor in companies deciding which service provider to use for their employees to ensure strong infrastructure and coverage that also reaches rural areas. Today, the concept of business continuity takes on a whole new dimension.
5G will close the gap for rural areas left by fiber
Since the introduction of VDSL connections, in many countries this technology has also been chosen as an alternative to FTTC and FTTH; VDSL made it possible to connect many rural areas in Europe with a reliable connection fast enough for today’s usage standards. The 5G will help support this transition, favoring the spread of fixed wireless access (FWA), which will be much easier and cheaper to implement than FTTH, ensuring superior coverage.

Rise of monetization opportunities for 5G
Service providers are investing heavily in 5G networks, although the pandemic has changed operational priorities, causing some slowdowns in pilot projects and production deployments. 5G is now a reality that offers operators new monetization opportunities. Thanks to very high speeds, huge connection density and very low latency, in 2021 we anticipate new developments in consumer applications (e.g. gaming, AR / VR / MR), in vertical markets (e.g. private 5G networks ), in consumer offers that include content. , on enterprise broadband and managed cloud services and FWA services.

Distribute 400G deployments beyond the cloud data center
While the new network economics can support continued growth in bandwidth demand, We will see the presence of the 400G grow again. Now that big cloud providers are riding the first wave in data centers and wide area networks, we anticipate the 400G boom in national service provider networks and various other situations (data center interconnection, core, peering and CDN gateway, among others.). There will be large-scale deployments of the 400G on the WAN, especially in the second half of the year, thanks to the availability of cheaper fiber optics that will reduce Opex, with fewer ports to manage and consumer pricing models that will allow operators to introduce updates gradually. Beyond 2021, 400G will make its appearance on metro networks, where 5G will bring even more traffic and network density.

Open RAN is now a fact
The The shift from service providers to open architectures will continue to be increasingly impetuous. in all areas from open access (such as Open RAN and Open OLT), to open broadband, open IP / optical and open core. For mobile operators, Open RAN is no longer a question of “if” but of “when”. There will be an acceleration of the adoption of Open RAN globally, with RFPs, tests and deployments, as many operators are committed to the democratization of radio access, primarily to foster diversity and innovation. Large-scale commercial implementations of Open RAN are relatively recent, but we will see a strengthening of the Open RAN ecosystem, the maturing of technology and new types of partnerships that will fundamentally change the way networks are installed, managed and used for value creation.

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