DT has become what’s possibly the first major carrier to show us what the network of the future is going to look like, though the description is still a bit cryptic and not always being picked up correctly in stories. All of the factors I’ve been blogging about for the last week, both the demand-side changes and technology issues, are focusing on a new vision of the network. It’s not the PSTN, but it’s really not the Internet either.
For the last four or five years, operators have been aware that the major revenue opportunities were likely to come from the delivery of services/experiences that were created by network-distributed intelligence. Content relies on CDNs and caching, and the cloud obviously relies on distributed computing. They recognized that in such networks, the “edge” was simply an agent or service connection point, and the “core” really didn’t exist in a traditional sense. Instead you had a web of trunk connections whose purpose was to create pooled facilities and not to pass end-to-end traffic. This is what a “cloud network” would look like.
Despite early carrier recognition of this point (I blogged publicly about this four years ago!) network technology in general and network equipment vendors in particular have been slow to accept what’s happening. In part, I think this was because they were uncomfortable with any change—sellers want to sell what they have—but in fairness the operators themselves haven’t really articulated the picture. That’s what DT has finally done. Just be aware that DT isn’t speaking just for itself; these plans are in the works in every single Tier One on the planet, and they’re going to revolutionize networking.
The Street hasn’t really picked up on this yet either, except to note that capex growth now seems slower than before (yes, because nobody wants to invest in something earning less ROI every month). I thought there might be a bit of an overhang effect here too; operators could slow their spending awaiting a paradigm. It will be interesting to see whether the DT comments stimulate more disclosure, more positioning, and more spending growth. But remember, the spending won’t be on networking-as-usual. That’s gone now; 2012 is the high-water mark of the old Internet.
The new network is driven in large part by the need to marshal resources ad hoc to fulfill users’ needs in a mobile broadband (“hyperconnected” is the current buzzword, which I hate because I hate all current buzzwords) world. There have been a slew of studies for literally generations showing that people think more quickly and more incisively when standing, and range more philosophically and broadly when laying down. Well, mobile people are clearly more in decision mode than couch potatoes and that’s creating a whole new demand for services, shifting from research to decision support. It’s that shift that moves us to cloud fulfillment.
It’s also a shift that may be rewiring our brains. A Pew study just announced suggests that people weaned on social networking and always-on mobility will by 2020 be a completely different kind of consumer, a completely different kind of worker. This change is the thing that I think is going to revolutionize cloud computing at the enterprise level. We draw workers from the pool of humanity after all, and as that pool rewires itself to become “hyperconnected” brain-wise, they are rewiring the optimum productivity flows and support tools that will support them as workers. It could bring about profound changes in every application we run in business, not to mention how business computing is done. There is zero chance that every application running today will migrate to the cloud based on cost; there is a slight chance that every application running today will be replaced by a cloud-hosted component set whose structure, interconnection, and behavior is attuned to the brains of the workers of the future.