New digital use cases are shaping our lives in ways unimaginable. Users want more bandwidth, better speed, newer use cases and a great customer experience. This demands a massive change in the ecosystem. Service providers need to augment their networks to accommodate these needs as well as exert on-demand control over the entire network. Re-designing the last-mile network infrastructure will ensure convergence of network access technologies thereby making it easier to meet growing users demand.
The cost incurred for this transformation is one of the key roadblocks for the service providers. To ensure a seamless transition with minimum cost involvement, they need to build universal network access, with programmability at both hardware and software level, separating control plane functions from data plane functions and virtualising the functions to meet technology and network demands. An open and flexible architecture coupled with modularity and programmability, enhances user experience to a great degree and establishes maximum control for service providers.
Key challenges of service providers
The service providers are facing multiple technical and business challenges which needs to be considered while drafting the strategic solution. Some of the key challenges, which every service provider would want to solve are: • How to deal with bandwidth explosion with increasing bit-rate and latencysensitive data consumption? • How can cost of last-mile connectivity be reduced? • How to design and deploy integrated infrastructure for last mile connectivity including PON and Mobile RAN?
