Eagle-Lanner tech blog

 

Before and during the terrorist attacks from September 11, 2001, the first responders relied only on commercial and radio networks. At the time of the 9/11 crisis, these commercial networks were overwhelmed. And although agencies could communicate with their radios, they couldn’t operate across agencies. Police couldn't talk with EMS and firefighters, and vice-versa.

What NFV aims at is the same for CSPs: to virtualize the network services/functions performed by proprietary hardware platforms and converge them into a centralized software version running on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)-based hardware. The benefits are clearly discernible:  reduction on CapEx and OpEX, agility in functionality, flexibility in service creation, operation automation, dynamic scalability, and market acceleration.

Open RAN has seen great strides in 2020, and this trend is even fuelled by recent bans on Chinese suppliers, encouraging mobile operators (particularly in those protected areas) to open up their networks to Open RAN faster in 2021. Below are five Open RAN trends that the industry can predict for 2021, and it is without question Open RAN is the theme of telecom 2021.

Today, what enterprises need is a distributed network architecture with higher performance; the networking architecture no more surrounds an on-premise centralized data center but moves its perimeter along with the end-users. Using SASE, SD-WAN capabilities are combined with critical cloud-native security services, protecting remote workers and their connectivity in motion.

With the advent of the multimedia era, the demand for video streaming and storage networks has multiplied, hence creating the need for high bandwidth and diversified services that guarantee service quality in metropolitan networks. Ethernet, being the most extensive local area network, is the current technically solvable method to solve the network bottlenecks between the metropolis and the access terminals. Utilizing Optical Ethernet technology, the Ethernet application field can be extended to the metropolitan network effectively. 

As a network technology built on SD-WAN, SASE improves not only security but management and network performance.  By integrating the security tools step by step, it can control security features like VPN remote access, firewalls, and gateways, meanwhile simplifying the network management by combining SD-WAN and other infrastructure into a single cloud-based platform.

It’s essential to realize how SD-WAN as the most advanced WAN option can offer simplification, alleviate the IT pains, maintaining bandwidth efficiency and provide uninterrupted connections to the cloud, particularly for those critical applications like the healthcare services; any unplanned network downtime, after all, can lead to more severe negative impact to patients other than financial and operational loss.