Converged connectivity
Leveraging EDGE technology for seamless convergence and proactive optimization
We hinted at convergence earlier from the purview of the end user, enabling them to seamlessly move from platform to platform with traditional services like linear video. However, this convergence is expansive across all layers of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) stack, the surrounding hardware and software ecosystem, and the people supporting and building it. The successful outcome of integration will produce a new technology architecture and approach. In our current state, cloud, telco, and infrastructure providers each have slightly different viewpoints of this thing, process, and model but likely use nomenclature associated with EDGE included somewhere.
This concept of EDGE creates the opportunity for a new “virtual agora” where network, cloud, and application not only meet but integrate to share meaningful insights. Once realized, the stakeholders on the user equipment (UE) and application development side have the optimal experience visibility accounting for the “lowest common denominator of risk” (i.e., the lowest risk to an experience a user or developer can tolerate before an adverse experience takes place) regardless of location, network type, or a myriad of other considerations. This allows for proactive and preventative optimization that maintains the overall reliability of service and provides for self-healing across the entire ecosystem.
Decreased distance increases the opportunity for optimal experiences
In 2024, cloud providers, infrastructure providers, and carriers will continue to position themselves nearer and nearer to each other while pushing closer and closer to the user in many cases, reducing the last mile to a last inch. This reduction in the physical distance between the entities helps mitigate the lowest common denominator of risk, improving but still garnering a “best effort” approach when a UE moves along the converged needs. To go beyond “best effort” and increase the optimal experience opportunity, it’s imperative that convergence happens as close to the end user as possible, with each stakeholder entity informing the other on their capabilities and performance needs/lacks in as close to real time as possible.
A new approach to convergence
Going beyond “best effort” must happen to experience things like autonomous vehicles or dynamic extended reality (xR) at scale. In the meantime, customers will have a better network experience as this convergence enables the virtualization of network functions, allowing telco providers to address experience needs more quickly on the network without having to roll a truck. While the horsepower needed to improve video is less than the needs or risks of autonomy, similar architecture and thinking are necessary at the “virtual agora.” To date, there have been successful implementations of these types within a controlled environment on controlled devices, demonstrating the technical feasibility of autonomy or dynamic xR. However, garnering the desired scale that will also improve experiences creates a need for a different set of people, technology, partnership, and methodology of thinking that’s part network, part cloud, and part application developer—and maybe more as the space at this time is an amorphous opportunity ground. When this technology and business framework gels and becomes nirvana, an experience and its corresponding site type can have the opportunity to receive maximum scale, maximum control, and maximum time horizon for the investment and return.
People: To enable this convergence, technologists who are comfortable across the entire OSI stack (i.e., network engineers who can also develop software and vice versa) are critical. Today, most media and communication providers have separate network and software development organizations. Identifying and cross-training network, application, and data engineers will become an essential part of the talent strategy.
Technology: Applications and network systems should be decomposed and used where needed, allowing for optimal use, security, and management of smaller, shared physical spaces.
Partnership: Convergence will drive changes in the way media and communications companies partner with their cloud providers. While that partnership is predominantly client and vendor today, there are opportunities for these two groups to co-develop products and services that drive other new products and services provided by external app owners.
Methodology: This converged environment creates a composite mindset and technology that hints at a new approach to the converged space. This mindset and technology approach balance one another amongst their areas of impact and another’s area of challenge.
Slalom contributors: Jason Inskeep, Jun Whitehead
