TIA 2011: Suppliers need to innovate as video explodes on network, AT&T exec says

DALLAS—“Go global, go mobile and go virtual are trends worldwide,” said Tim Harden, president of Supply Chain & Fleet Operations at AT&T Inc., during a keynote address Friday at Telecommunications Industry Association’s TIA2011: Inside the Network show.
The distance between intent and action has shortened; application programming interfaces have become the IP, driving integration and convergence as well as increased productivity, both in business and in one’s personal life, Harden said. “The world is moving from ‘talk to me’ to’ show me,’ “ as video becomes more popular. Virtualization will change how people work as the cloud becomes more popular and shared infrastructure becomes more common.
Devices, fast networks and the cloud are transforming business, Harden said. Machine-to-machine devices are exploding, and AT&T believes around 412 million M2M connections will exist in 2014. At that same time, emerging devices could total about 86 million.
Cisco Systems Inc. reported that 78% of traffic comes from smartphones, but only 13% of devices on the network are smartphones. Over the next five years, AT&T expects to seen an eight to 10 times increase in traffic volume driven by very rich media and a desire by consumers and businesses to reach that media, as well as devices that enable easy access to media. Harden said that prediction could be an understatement, telling the audience his 16-month-old granddaughter’s first two words were her name and iPad.
IP traffic is surging is well. Projected IP backbone traffic will total 41Exabytes per year in 2013 and 425 Exabytes per year by 2018, which is going to be challenging for operators and suppliers to meet that demand, but good for everyone in the industry. Video will be 90% of that consumer traffic by 2013.
Suppliers need to change the way they do business to meet these challenges, Harden said, noting that it took 25 years to get to five-nines reliability in a TDM environment, but operators cannot work in that timeframe today. Suppliers will need to innovate, cooperate with others, integrate with other solutions as well as be reliable and have equipment available.