As we put together our list of top five predictions for 2010, we also sought the opinion of other industry experts on their thoughts for the new year. Take a look at what these industry experts believe will be dominant trends in 2010 below:
Dave Stehlin, President of Overture Networks:
- Sunset for SONET - The 3x CAPEX improvement of Native Ethernet over SONET will be too compelling to pass up when fiber must be taken to tens-of-thousands of new towers in 2010 to support 4G rollouts.
- G.8032 Rings - One of the things carriers want to keep from their SONET architecture is the standards-based 50ms protection switching on multi-node rings. ITU G.8032 enables this same solution on carrier-class Ethernet.
- MEF 18 - The Metro Ethernet Forum certification program for delivering DS1s over Native Ethernet will become the gold standard for wireless carriers and backhaul providers who need a solution to deliver Ethernet plus DS1s over Native Ethernet backhaul for combined 2G, 3G and 4G services.
Gary Bolton, VP of Global Marketing, ADTRAN:
- SMB/Enterprise trends: For the SMB and enterprise, it will be the accelerated shift toward converged services. Businesses are looking for ways to consolidate resources and business processes. This combined with the move to IP-based services, enabled by SIP Trunking, is making it more attractive than ever before for businesses of all sizes to transition from TDM-based services to newer technologies like Unified Communications.
- Carriers up the bandwidth: For carriers, the focus will be bandwidth to deliver enhanced services such as cloud-based and triple play solutions. The move to converged services is driving the need for bandwidth at an unprecedented rate. While fiber is the ultimate answer, carriers will continue to deploy technology enhancements that will allow them to drive more bandwidth to the customer utilizing their existing infrastructure.
Tom Maufer, IMS Forum:
- NGN Service Outages: NGN service outages will be mainstream news globally since their increasingly frequent use begins to severely impact mission-critical business and consumer services. Enterprises and consumers will want to know why their IP services are failing and subsequently demand that operators do something proactive to prevent future service disruption.
- Service rollout expenses: New service rollouts will take operators more time and cost more money than expected due to the underlying complexity and constantly changing nature of these advanced 3G, LTE or IMS-based applications. Operators will push harder on their vendors to deliver higher quality solutions for their networks. These added service quality and functional testing requirements will lead to delayed product releases.
- Service and network stress: Many consumers of 3G and real-time applications are pulling on their operators to roll out richer and richer services at increasingly faster rates coupled with an expectation of improving service quality at the same or lower costs. This network requirement will stress applications, the network and back office BSS/OSS systems into periodic failure and increasingly frequent periods of unpredictable performance.
- Standard challenges: Newer standards (e.g. GRE) while interesting to operators for intelligent service deployment fail to deliver promised interoperability between different vendor implementations. This continues a previously unresolved trend for important, widely used telecom protocols like SIP and BGP that often experience failures not due to application load but due to interoperability and functional weaknesses that no vendor alone could have tested.
- Cloud services: Cloud-based storage, application delivery (Saas) and even Smart Grid-based metering applications all gain increasing interest from a wide range of conventional network operators and some newer entries like larger utilities. The largest business expansion will center on cloud-based application delivery since wide-ranging Internet access by both business and consumers is pushing richer applications to the edge of the cloud.