The need for speed – high-speed internet – along with greater bandwidth capacity will continue to be critical for communities everywhere in 2025 and beyond
The need for speed – high-speed internet – along with greater bandwidth capacity will continue to be critical for communities everywhere in 2025 and beyond
Network operators should anticipate demand for more and more bandwidth, as network traffic growth shows no sign of slowing down.
What’s driving all the bandwidth consumption? We rely on the internet for products, services, and applications we use continuously more and more. Smartphones, smart watches, other wearables, smart TVs, streaming services, real-time events (e.g. concert, sports), online gaming, along with virtual and augmented reality are some of the products and applications growing network traffic and consuming bandwidth.
As a fiber optic network provider, Great Plains Communications sees a continued rise in network traffic as an ongoing trend. Knowing there is a critical need for increasing bandwidth, network operators must implement best network practices in key areas to meet demand, improve productivity, and minimize disruption of customers’ everyday lives.
AI plus good data = best customer experience
AI means different things to different groups. Transferring information between data centers for AI applications consumes high bandwidth. Yet, AI is now part of the pit crew that keeps the network running. For network operators, AI means automation to drive greater efficiency across organizations and supply bandwidth on demand.
We view AI evolving as an enabler to enhancing the customer experience. In the past, operators were reactive: a customer alerted the operator when something broke and they fixed it. Currently, most are more proactive, deploying technologies in a ring topology with redundant equipment to mitigate downtime. With AI, events can be more predictive: for example, a problem is detected and fixed before the issue can be customer affecting.
Thanks to AI’s prediction ability, potential network disruptions can be averted. It stands to reason that a network will need more bandwidth during a live Thursday night football game. AI can calculate if the network has the necessary capacity and redundancy to ensure the audience never misses a play through buffering or other hiccups.
Network operators must leverage AI to create a better experience for their customers. However, along with the right tools and systems, AI must leverage reliable data to make the right decisions.
Timely network services
We’ve come to expect real-time services like Amazon Web Services model, which is available 24/7/365. We shop online, press a button, and our purchase arrives the next day. That has become consumers’ standard. So, they expect other products and services to be simpler and faster to obtain as well.
People rely on cell phones to do almost everything, and when we pull up all the applications we’re using, we’re consuming more bandwidth than we realize. Hyperscalers that want more and higher bandwidth to connect their data centers are another driver of increased network traffic. At Great Plains Communications (GPC), we see more demand for 400 Gig services, especially between key markets.
As a result, network providers must become more agile, monitor services more effectively, and add more products and services that work in tandem to meet current and future customer needs. One of the biggest challenges network operators face is predicting demand and growth trends and then planning and updating networks accordingly to be ready. To accomplish this, it is vital to have flexible architecture to scale the network capacity to meet changing bandwidth requirements in metro and rural areas.
Data to the cloud
Over the past decade, most businesses have either already done so or are planning to migrate most of their data from their own private onsite servers to cloud storage, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others. It’s a big shift from how data used to be stored in private clouds to public clouds and a multi-cloud environment.
It is critical for businesses (and all of us) to have real-time access to data. We don’t want to wait or have the data lag. The cloud data warehouses offer virtually unlimited space with the ability to compute capacity and storage to scale up and down at greater cost savings. This is a tremendous advantage, which does require more bandwidth.
As consumers, we also rely on cloud storage. After all, we can’t store all our videos in our phone. We want to view a video and interact immediately. This requires reliable connectivity to the cloud, so we have immediate access to our data, wherever it’s stored. Reliable connectivity to the internet and to cloud providers is essential.
Future runs on higher bandwidth
From my point of view, both as a telecom network operator and as a consumer, having bandwidth infrastructure optimized to support current and future rising network traffic is a must-have. There are many considerations, but here are factors I consider essential.
First, the network infrastructure has to deliver adequate speeds. Speed alone is not enough. We also need reliable connectivity we can trust day in and day out. This calls for careful planning and best-in-class architecture when designing the network. And, most important, we need to provide the best possible customer experience in our digital age. We should take advantage of AI and other technologies to anticipate network demands, automate processes to drive efficiencies, and provide the best possible solutions for our customers.