Network Conundrum For a Web Services World

The era of dynamic and unpredictable services traffic is now.  Carrier networks, still designed with the operational requirement for accurate prediction of service traffic, have only seen incremental improvements rather than step change. Network operators must consider radical options to support future bandwidth demands for next generation services.

                       

During the last decade internet and web services have become the de facto medium for communications, entertainment, information, and work.  Service growth has followed exponentially, fusing spectacularly to the extent that it is difficult, or indeed impossible, to differentiate the service delivered and/or to distinguish the role that the consumer is performing. Yet despite these advancements in services, there has been no significant development or change to the primary network optical transport network since their introduction.

                 

Networking mantra appears to have been to build the biggest optical pipes possible, at the lowest capital cost and fill them as full as possible.  No serious consideration however has been given to the underlying services, resulting in ‘hub and spoke’ architectures being unnecessarily too big and costly with the spokes not connecting where the services need to be. The impact is significant increases in OPEX and TCO with low levels of asset utilisation. Network operators now need to fundamentally re-think their approach to meet future business demands.

                      

Meanwhile, new market dynamics have created an environment where the pressures and demands on a carriers’ network and operations are growing exponentially whilst revenues and profits are simultaneously shrinking dramatically.  Whilst innovation and investment has been made in IP routing and consumer devices, very little has changed in the underlying packet switching and optical fibre network that interconnect the IP based servers and routers to the IP enabled consumer devices. 

                   

Web services by their nature are dynamic and unpredictable and with increasingly set of video rich features - demanding ever increasing bandwidth per service and guaranteed quality of experience.  However, the dilemma is that current carrier networks are managed and provisioned based upon predicted future patterns of usage from historical data that has taken days, weeks, and months to collate and is then analysed as a basis to predict and formulate future network changes.  It is well acknowledged that accurate forward CAPEX investment planning for the network based on historical data is an increasingly impossible task to achieve, whilst being an exceptionally slow and costly process.

                    

In addition, carriers have been unable to align their business and operational models and keep pace with the market and consumer demands – and therefore revenue opportunities.  This discontinuity has created an overly complex, static, and unresponsive network infrastructure that continues to be disconnected from the services value chain.

                      

The largest fixed cost within the carrier business is typically the network infrastructure which has remained largely the same – hierarchical and asymmetrical from the core through the metro to the access, whilst  new services are symmetrical in profile, and hosted from a variety of distributed rather than centralised sources. Whilst service providers have strived to reduce operational costs through functional consolidation, process improvement and workforce reduction - fixed costs such as power and real estate remain very high and are directly correlated to the size and complexity of the network.