Top 5 trends in networking industry: ABI Research

BANGALORE, INDIA: Presenting the top five trends in networking industry from ABI Research for 2013 from its new study, 'What to Watch For in 2013 and the Years Beyond'. )

1. Bandwidth, OTT service support and QoS will be key competition areas for telcos and MNOs

OTT services, such as Netflix, Hulu, Redbox, and others, will continue to grow. In the next 5 years, Telcos and MNOs will battle to retain existing subscribers and gain new subscribers by improving their service offerings, but will see ARPU consolidate to a level that will be directly proportional to the value of services offered. The impact of new entrant Google as a high-speed fiber broadband service provider in the United States, will drive other service providers to bump up their value offerings by next year.

2. Broadband gateways to replace modems and routers

Broadband gateways will increasingly find their way into homes of top tier customers with bundled triple play service subscription, while replacing modems and routers in the next 2 to 3 years' time. With the decrease in the number of broadband CPEs per home, broadband service providers will play an increasing role in supporting CPEs using TR-069 to improve customer experience, efficiency of networks, and decrease dependence on vendors for after sales service.

3. SDNs will disrupt mobile equipment vendors

Like Pavlov's dog, MNOs are salivating at breaking the lock-in established by incumbent equipment vendors. The irresistible move toward the disruption of their supply chain with SDN is gaining both mindshare and momentum. In 2012, we see 10 Tier One operators banding together to start things moving with the Network Functions Virtualization initiative with hopes of achieving massive CAPEX and OPEX savings from homogenized, virtualized, and generic networks of IT equipment.

4. Network hardware - general purpose or dedicated?

The use of general purpose hardware to run high-performance network protocols is likely to be a big topic of debate in 2013. Traditional silicon vendors from Freescale, Texas Instruments (TI), and Xilinx are all likely to push for the need for dedicated hardware. However, Intel is already starting to make inroads with its new Crystal Forest chip being powerful enough to run data plane processing.

5. Access is the new backhaul

With heterogeneous and small cell network architectures, many more access nodes will spring up in the network, possibly five to ten times more than what we have traditionally seen. As a result, the issue of backhauling these access nodes is becoming an important topic of discussion. Suggest exist that some nodes could become aggregation points, using tree or star branching. We are likely to end up with a grid-like structure, with hierarchies of macro, micro, pico, and, possibly, femtocells, all backhauling to the core.