Telecommunications is a dynamic industry full of innovation. Meeting the challenges of the industry requires highly specialized solutions. With an entire marketplace of 5G technologies available, businesses are aggressively bolstering solutions to meet customer demand to either remain competitive or seize a market advantage. By embracing edge-based systems, entire data processes can occur closer to consumers and data sources, resulting in numerous benefits, such as faster data delivery. With constantly increasing volumes of data cycling, there are some non-negotiable capabilities telcos need to employ to meet demand while pursuing day-to-day functions. While business goals vary across organizations, the best modern business solutions streamline resources for scale so that businesses can continue to innovate, grow and operate.
It’s no longer a luxury to deploy at the edge; it’s expected. Similarly, forging toward the edge has become ubiquitously mainstream, rather than reserved for a select handful of companies. Pushing processing to the edge will enable companies to serve their customers in real time, and it’s possible and efficient with the right tools in place. Though it may seem daunting, telecom operators that want to modernize at the edge will need to transform their IT architecture and operations, integrating these four specific capabilities with business priorities. Doing so will position them for high performance and edge leadership, especially while pursuing a low total cost of ownership or high total economic impact.
Massive ingestion
Streaming data pours in from mobile, 5G and IoT sensor applications. With operators casting aside network centralization and pursuing more highly distributed networks, it’s more important than ever to scale without sacrificing performance. With ever-increasing throughput globally, data needs to be taken in at scale before it can be leveraged and applied. Telcos need to make sure that they find tools to ingest their massive amounts of data with demonstrated data-heavy use cases. Taking in more data from more sources means a greater opportunity to apply that data in decisioning.
Low latency
Whether consumers know this or not, this is the most important element to them. They demand the service they request be delivered as quickly as possible, accomplished by moving the network infrastructure closer to the end user. Low latency data processing powers real-time execution and it accelerates the reading and writing of data for a streamlined sub-millisecond response. Ideally, database requests should be sent directly to the node holding the data without any intermediate processing or obstacles to overcome, leading to high performance without additional cost and scale issues.
Furthermore, many innovative companies are seeking to reduce their server footprint to simultaneously save on resources and also pivot for growth. Moving to the telco edge decreases “server sprawl” by enabling a small, efficient footprint without sacrificing performance. This type of architecture can include solid-state drives (SSD) optimized to work as dynamic random access memory (DRAM). So how low is low latency? Single-digit millisecond round trip from client location to the edge and back is a reasonable benchmark.
High-speed processing
With billions of transactions pending per second, high-speed processing can move those transactions over the finish line quickly and at scale. Accelerating data transaction speed under a heavy workload can sound overwhelming, but it is a key component to achieve low latency operation. For context, another key component is computation accelerators such as special ASICs, GPUs and FPGAs. Tools need to manage, leverage and analyze vast amounts of data across silos at any given time — all the time. With dynamic workloads, it’s important to avoid the rigidity of a fixed data model so a specific schema does not limit use cases. Processing data dynamically at the edge, in real time and at petabyte scale can provide the instantaneous transactions needed for critical and on-demand services.
Always-on availability
If massive ingestion, low latency and high-speed processing are all taken into account, businesses also need to prioritize service reliability. Telcos need to ensure 99.999% data availability at edge locations closest to end users. This uptime may seem very demanding, but it is expected and possible with modern infrastructure. Power like this enables massive device connectivity across highly distributed networks for instantaneous transactions — potentially leading to new use cases where downtime is not tolerated.
While each of these pillars is essential, their sum is exponentially greater than each part and becomes essential to business imperatives. They need to work seamlessly and harmoniously with one another. The techniques and technologies that served well in the past are no longer good enough; telecom requires innovation. Implementing real-time, at-scale data capabilities will help businesses serve customers better than ever. As a result, telcos should experience lower churn rates, increased subscribers and most importantly, higher revenues through the introduction of new edge use cases. 2022 can be a make-or-break year for companies bold enough to transform the way they operate.
