By Etan Vlessing
SAN FRANCISCO – The march to 5G promises the newest and fastest networks where wireless carriers can offer next generation applications like VR, better and faster online gaming, driverless cars and improved VOD and TV to consumer and business subscribers.
But how to get the Canadian carriers and service providers from here – current 4G LTE networks – to future 5G and more G deployments as Moore’s Law slows and the operating cost and complexity of Internet plumbing grows?
Cisco, insisting it has tackled the network challenges slowing the race to 5G (which needs significant, deep, fibre backhaul), in San Francisco last week rolled out its road map for new and better Internet infrastructure and network innovations around all of its core technology.
Over the next decade, Cisco says, digital experiences will be created with advanced technologies — virtual and augmented reality, 16K streaming, AI, 5G, 10G, quantum computing, adaptive and predictive cybersecurity, intelligent IOT, and others not yet invented – will drive complexity beyond the capabilities current internet infrastructure can viably support.
And the breakthroughs in Internet networking have come with Cisco’s new high performance chip architecture, Silicon One and its new carrier router series Cisco 8000.
“The Internet is hitting a wall. There’s more innovation, but not the pipes to handle the traffic required for 5G.” – Chuck Robbins, Cisco
“The Internet is hitting a wall. There’s more innovation, but not the pipes to handle the traffic required for 5G,” Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins told a December 11 presentation which Cartt.ca attended.
Cisco, known for its routers and other tech gear to shift big data packages across the internet, argues its latest networking breakthroughs was five years in the making and will help Canadian carriers cope with increased data demands, while lowering costs and ensuring network consistency and security.
Bell Canada, Telus, Rogers and other Canadian broadband and wireless providers will take notice because the economics of innovating and delivering the Internet to subscribers is no longer sustainable as Moore’s Law – which says the number of transistors on a single silicon chip will double every two years at the same cost – is hitting a smallness limit.
Despite the increasing tsunami of content and data on the Internet promised by 5G and beyond, the ability to keep network operating costs down as online traffic and users grows is increasingly threatened.
Stephen Liu, Cisco’s senior director of communications for service providers, told Cartt.ca Moore’s Law isn’t dead, but it’s also no longer a self-fulfilling prophecy and needs updating as the industry faces an increasing inability to make silicon chips and their tiny electronic switches for computer processing ever smaller.
“Service providers are spending a lot of money trying to keep up with growing traffic – exponential growth – and that’s straining the economics,” Liu said of this technical processing and networking ceiling threatening content carriers as they continue to have to scale their networks, physically and economically, to serve customers with seemingly never-ending bandwidth needs.
To keep computing smaller, faster and cheaper, Cisco unveiled Silicon One, a single, unified and programmable silicon architecture that goes beyond switching technology or routing technology to serve as both routing and switching in one product.
Until now, major carriers have built their networks using a host of fragmented devices powered by varied application-specific integrated circuits to drive traffic. It’s that complexity which is proving increasingly costly to carriers as they struggle to find efficiencies while maintaining and growing their systems.
Cisco’s new Silicon One devices is a unified product capable of pushing over 10 terabits of bandwidth per second, and eventually 25 terabits per second, promises to cut complexity and costs as carriers launch new products and services. The company has eliminated the need for different devices with different chips.
“We’re creating a platform for innovation,” David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Network and Security Business, told the San Francisco unveiling about a unified silicon architecture set to work anywhere on a carrier’s network and be used in any manner needed for product innovation.
For Canadian Internet providers, that potentially changes the economics of the Internet by cutting operating expenses and time and effort spent to select and profit from new tech applications and services as port rates over time move from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps and eventually terabit speeds.
Cisco also claims its new Cisco 8000 series of carrier-size routers built with Silicon One will reduce the cost to build and operate mass scale networks for Canadian carriers running tech applications for next-generation 5G, video streaming and cloud-based services. It also announced new purchasing options that enable carrier customers to consume the company’s technology through disaggregated business models.
More important, the new Internet guts will help Canadian carriers avoid seeing their current Internet infrastructure taxed to breaking point.
Liu adds the promise of always-on and mass connectivity from 5G will be realized first by major business customers at Rogers, Bell and Telus tapping the Internet of Things (IoT), including AI, autonomous operations, virtual reality and drones, among other innovations.
For Canadian mobile phone users, they’re unlikely to notice major 5G innovations for a couple years, even though Canadian carriers will begin launching 5G in 2020. “We shouldn’t expect consumers to go from 4G to 5G and pay more. Where the monetization will be early on is in the business subscribers. The productivity Cisco will bring is valuable,” he explained.
How will business customers directly benefit from the ability to run tech applications more flexibly, faster, better, cheaper and more securely with dramatic speed increases from 5G over both 3G and 4G technologies?
As enterprise customers demand more speed and capacity, Cisco’s at work on silicon photonics technologies to allow router and switch port rates for carriers and other service providers to continue increasing as complexity and costs are reduced.
Again, blame Moore’s Law. “ASIC (or integrated circuit chips) has a certain number of pins. Making them to go to 100G or 400G, that electrical signal will not go through anymore. Optics will be required to allow the ASIC to expand capacity,” explains Bill Gartner, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Optical Systems.
Next-generation silicon photonics technologies that moves data among computer chips optically far quicker than current line cards or ASIC technology should allow digital signal processing that increases network capacity for carriers, while simplifying network operations.
