A more efficient network is a top priority for the nation’s third largest carrier, according to Sprint CTO Stephen Bye. Bye recently told a Silicon Valley audience that current network economics are unsustainable.
“It’s a big problem for the industry,” he said. “When you look at the amount of capacity and the demand for capacity in the data network and the investment that’s required to support the usage, it is certainly outpacing where we see the revenue opportunity today. So we’ve got to find more efficient ways to move traffic and content around the network.”
Bye’s audience at the Telecom Council‘s TC3 event was comprised largely of software developers eager to partner with carriers in their quest to optimize network assets. The Sprint CTO outlined three top focus areas for his company: network security, management of cloud-based gaming, and management of other rich media.
Network-based security
Bye noted that he hears a lot of discussion about device security, but less about network-based security. He said devices are one part of the security picture, but that Sprint also wants to focus on securing network appliances and servers.
The high stakes of network security were highlighted last month when Vodafone said that a hacker had compromised its network in Germany and accessed customer names, addresses, birth dates and some limited bank account information. More than two million individuals were affected.
Cloud-based gaming
“When you look at cloud-based gaming there is certainly a growing amount of traffic on the network and requirements for low latency,” said Bye. “When you look at some of the richness of the graphics that are coming [and] what’s enabled by the devices as well as what’s enabled by the network, we need to find ways to better support this growth in the traffic on the network and deliver a great experience around that.”
Bye was quick to point out that Sprint does not intend to address gaming by getting involved with the games themselves. “We’re not in the business of building games, we’re in the business of building the infrastructure that supports that environment,” he said.
Rich media
Carriers are learning that as customers get access to LTE, video quickly becomes the lion’s share of their data usage. Bye said that he hears a lot about the CDN (content delivery network) model, a model which he says has been “hounded to death.”
“How do we more efficiently move very rich media and content through the network regardless of what kind of content that is?” he asked. “It could be 4K HD content, it could be simply user-generated content, it could be multimedia files that are embedded into different applications. We need to be able to find an efficient way to move that content through and around the network.”
Bye went on to remind his audience that the network is perhaps the most important part of the mobile ecosystem, and that carriers need to find ways to monetize that value. “I like watching ads for smartphones and how smart smartphones are, but really they’re kind of dumb without the network,” Bye said. “Really a phone is nothing but a paperweight unless it’s got access to the network or the cloud. So we see ourselves as providing that critical link. But we’re looking to enhance the value of that link and that connection within the network to the applications and the content.”
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