Networking is the business of traffic and capacity, supply and demand, and we have some news in both of these spaces. I’d love to say that we had news suggesting that the balancing of these two factors—critical for any market—was being achieved. I can’t. Like politics, business often bogs down in posturing and fails to address the key issues.
There are some interesting developments in the area of serving rural customers with broadband, developments that might even end up impacting how anybody without FTTH potential might be served. Verizon has announced a HomeFusion service that would use a home hub linked to LTE via a special installed external antenna that would presumably offer better range than in-appliance antennas and thus permit the service to be extended beyond traditional cell boundaries.
Another supply-side development is the news from BT and Alcatel-Lucent that they’ve pushed fiber to the 400G level. While the media tends to focus on fiber in the FTTH context and yearn for the gigabit-to-the-home future, data shows that there’s pretty much no market for high-end broadband even today when 100 meg is fast. You also hear that “the core” is the problem, but most video traffic will never see the core of the Internet. The real issue is metro, and what we’re trying to work out today is how fiber would play into the delivery of metro-cached content and mobile backhaul, both applications that have significant traffic and cost implications. Video delivery is many-to-one in architecture and the deployment of a smart CDN strategy (we’ll cover vendor CDN strategies in Netwatcher in April) could significantly impact cost and performance. But mobile services’ impact on metro networking is harder to predict because the space is evolving. Forget fiber in the core or to the home, friends. It’s metro fiber we need to be working on now, and that’s not just a numbers game as I’ve said before, it’s a complete rethinking of IP network principles around the reality of traffic, profit, and topology.
Apple is launching its new iPad today, and one thing that everyone is expecting (particularly Wall Street) is that it will be targeted more to enterprises. Some think that Apple is going to reverse a long-standing yuppie-individualist slant in its vision of company IT, but I think that’s doubtful. They’re finally winning with that vision. The BYOD wave, which is a bit of the worker rebellion against intransigent IT sort of wave that Apple has always seen coming, is combining with thin client and cloud to create a more individualistic edge. That opens new security, stability, and performance issues at the traditional level but most of all it opens the opportunity to integrate cloud-hosted worker-enablement tools without worrying too much about IT backing.
Between supply and demand is regulation, and EU regulators have told the Internet Advertising Bureau that its do-not-track button in browsers will satisfy EU rules only if users are given a chance to make an informed choice about tracking and if companies then suspend information collection except where it’s needed to support the actual web service the user has elected to invoke. This suggests we may have another collision on the roadmap, one between the ever-exploding number of eager social startups who want to leverage advertising revenue, and the likelihood that the more companies try to collect and personalize, the more users will get scared or disgusted and opt out. Given that ad revenues are a very small part of total service revenues for network services, ad sponsorship can’t afford to lose much without starting a downward spiral that threatens them with losing everything. Some, I hear, are already saying that usage pricing in broadband may usher in usage pricing for social network and even search.