Cisco has a strategy to help communication service providers and web scale companies around the world connect, secure and automate their networks to deliver a stronger, more accessible internet to everyone, everywhere, regardless of geographic limitations.
Living in the pandemic, people, businesses, governments and communities have come to rely on the power of connections to keep the world running. The internet went from being a must-have, to a critical lifeline for most everyone to connect to information, and each other. Video conferencing skyrocketed as people were forced to work from home and into online learning. Together with remote healthcare services, streaming video, gaming and more, internet traffic spiked by 25-45 percent in many regions across the globe.
The networks powered through, but Cisco predicts this is only a glimpse of the traffic volume we will see in the 5G era, with 29.3B connected devices expected in 20232. Internet architecture needs continuous care and attention to support the world's ambitions. With over three billion people still without access to the internet, a digital divide continues to develop where many are without access to vital information, learning and opportunities. The need to transform how we build networks is critical.
"Cisco has spent the last five years researching and investing in this portfolio of innovation, focusing on how to help our customers deliver the best internet, while being able to grow revenue, reduce their costs and mitigate risk," said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. "By helping our customers make the right decisions for their networks today, we are setting the world up for success, to connect more people, places and things than ever before. We can all look back on this point in time in the next ten years and celebrate how we rose to the challenge and did the right thing to take care of the internet."
Changing the Economics of the Internet
Building networks to grow and extend the internet to more areas has been a challenging process for network operators. Answering the call, Cisco designed its Converged SDN Transport, an innovative blueprint designed to help service providers converge multiple networks into a common, cost efficient and secure infrastructure with enormous scale.
Today, Cisco is helping to further simplify the constructs of the internet with its Routed Optical Networking solution aimed at collapsing IP and Optical networks. With Acacia's pluggable coherent optics, advancements in Segment Routing and Ethernet VPN, and new Cisco Crosswork Cloud capabilities, operators can build lean, efficient, easy-to-operate networks capable of supporting the levels of traffic expected with 5G.
Industry Response:
Routed Optical Networking (RON) is an architectural shift that drives massive, unprecedented simplification of networks with substantial economic impact. In our modeling, we found an average savings of 46% in total cost of ownership, with 57% savings in recurring operational costs. RON allows service providers to eliminate layers to simplify the network and have a more substantial impact of delivering the more cost-effective packets and makes the network more reliable.
"Today traffic growth is non-stop, which makes the Cisco cloud-native BNG solution a real game-changer. With BNGs distributed closer to end-users, we can achieve exponential scale in our network without added operational complexity. It also supports more distributed CDN locations which means we can deliver a greater end-user experience and reduce core network traffic demand, resulting in better economics. And finally, the move to a cloud-native model, with separate user and control planes, will eventually support the delivery of access-agnostic services using a converged wireline and 5G subscriber management solution." — Per-Øyvind Ødegård, Chief Architect Infrastructure, Altibox
"Historically, building and operating a multi-layer architecture has always been a challenge. Thanks to game-changing innovations that span across silicon, routing systems and standardized 400G coherent pluggable optics, complex layers can finally converge into a simpler and more scalable architecture with evolving cost structures and efficiencies. Telia Carrier has spearheaded this transition leveraging building blocks such as the Cisco 8000 and NCS 5700, resulting in a network that is easier to maintain, faster to adapt and cheaper to operate. We expect communication service providers to aggressively transition existing metro and long-haul networks in the coming year." — Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist, Telia Carrier.