Last year the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) released a thought piece “Tomorrow’s Telco – Connectivity Requirements for the Next Decade” that outlined a consensus view on network architecture, capabilities, and requirements needed to meet customer expectations and create value in the coming years. This document outlined how the sector needs to adapt to meet new customer demands, changing competitive dynamics and emerging business models. To meet future customer expectations, there will need to be a seamless end-point to end-point connectivity experience.
Delivering “Tomorrow’s Telco” necessitates adapting to new demand drivers which require similar network capabilities to deliver robust end products to the marketplace.
Next-generation applications:-
- Digital Enterprise
- Mass 5G Adoption
- Cloud as Standard
- IoT and Industry 3.0
- Immersive Consumer Content
have similar network requirements
- Low Latency
- High Capacity
- Secure & Trusted
- QoS Consistent
- Adaptable
- Globally Standard
Tomorrow’s Telco:
- The network of tomorrow’s telco should be built to deliver on the cross-use-case expectations rather than individual use-cases
- Future connectivity requirements must be considered from end-point to end-point –where end-users could be consumers, enterprise locations or machines
- End-to-end connectivity provision will require multiple network infrastructures and end-users will focus on service delivery leading to increased network infrastructure agnosticism
- To deliver the end-to-end multi-network of tomorrow’s telco, GLF believes there are seven requirements and four new capabilities that need to be developed
- These requirements and developments need to be available across network providers so they can be available consistently
Requirements:
- Capacity on demand – Interconnect & settlement model for capacity on-demand
- Real-time inventory – Industry standard approach for exposing inventory
- Route diverse selection – Promote increase in infrastructure route diversity
- Usage-based pricing – Development of usage-based pricing and settlement model
- QoS-level guarantee – Industry standard approach for QoS for different service levels
- App-Driven dynamic capacity management – Agreement on uniform dynamic capacity management service & settlement approach
- Automated trusted business processes leveraging distributed ledger technology to ensure secure & trusted data flows
Capabilities:
- End-to-End Security – Development of minimum security standards
- Cloud-native – Standards to build interoperable cloud-based solutions for the network
- Real-time interoperability – Operational rules for automated interoperability of multiple networks
- Network Agnostic – QoS standards for constant experience using multiple delivery infrastructures
Key Takeaways:
- To deliver the end-to-end multi-network of tomorrow’s telco, GLF believes there are seven requirements and four new capabilities that need to be developed
- These requirements and developments need to be available across network providers so they can be available consistently
In a nutshell this means the industry must evolve to automated, as a Service, on-demand and interoperable networks.
Our next post will address progress towards this network of the future paradigm by reviewing proceedings of the MEF Global NaaS Event held earlier this month in Dallas.