JOSEPH CUMELLO GAMING & ESPORTS
The difference between next generation networks that are being built today and networks of the past is this ability to modify or change network parameters.
These are all some of the new concepts that all operators are trying to build to, a new way that networks are being built. I’m not saying everyone’s there yet, but that’s where it’s going.
meet those requirements, then you’re in a pretty good spot to help carriers adjust to whether it’s e-gaming or IoT or whatever the situation is. There’s lots of different elements to that, but at a high level, that’s our approach.
Ciena has a product called Route Optimisation and Analysis as part of our Blue Planet portfolio that actually looks at potential congestion points in the network and says, okay, maybe there’s a big tournament happening, or there’s a big streaming event happening and then it feeds that congestion. It can talk to a controller, which need not be a Ciena controller, and that will increase or decrease bandwidth or resources to deal with the problem. The difference between next generation networks that are being built today and networks of the past is this ability to modify or change network parameters. This ability was really limited in the past and was bolted on to those networks. Now, all the software control we’re building into networks means we can for instance, manage margin on an optical circuit, or utilise unused existing margin to increase bandwidth for a period of time. These are all ways to shift the parameters of the network to deal with these traffic spikes. These are some of the things being developed, but all of this effort is to create what really matters at the end of the day: a positive experience for gamers, because they’re paying for the service, and they’re competing in the tournaments. From a streaming standpoint, there’s some interesting data out there from ESL and other gaming leagues on some of their championship events, which are often streamed to more people than things like the Super Bowl. So now, we have an issue with streaming, where you’ve got anything up to several million people globally watching the big Championship match for whatever the hot game is at that moment. That then brings its own challenges, because now you’re talking about tablets, TVs, mobiles and PC’s with everything streaming from data centres at once. Again, the same kind of network parameters apply, with software control, looking at congestion and modifying network parameters to deal with that congestion. A lot of this technology is state of the art. We’re talking about AI and software control technology, and programmable infrastructure that can adapt or adjust to specific conditions.
How have these developments impacted on the industry as a whole?
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What are you working on to take this forward into the future, because it’s obviously not going
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to go away?
JC The key factor here, related to gaming, but more importantly related to everything we do in networking, is the movement by the industry to insist that the vendor community open up their software interfaces in their platforms. This means that you can no longer go to an operator or a cloud network provider, and say, “Here’s my hardware and it only works with this software.” That 30-year-old modus operandi has been blown out of the water. Now when you show up to the party, you have to say, “Here are my API’s and here’s how you access my system. My software will do it really well, but if you want to use someone else’s software, that’s okay.” This I believe, is one of the biggest mind-shifts that has happened in the last five years. You can call it SDN, automation, opening up the OSS, whatever, but to me, that is the inflection point. So whether it’s 5G or gaming, or IoT, it almost doesn’t matter. The shift in these disruptions is creating that requirement. The optical programmes are no different; the optical platforms have to be open as well.
No, it’s not going to go away. that’s for sure. I think our whole philosophy as a business is from
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an investment standpoint, to allow our customers to have comfort that when they invest in us, they’re investing in a level of future proofing that’s not just about being able to scale their networks up to 800G tomorrow, or optics, but also, from a broad perspective, across software and packet access services, and that we’ve got the right tools for them to adjust to things like e-gaming. So it’s being built into our hardware, software and our services. How the company operates is really around helping our customers manage disruption. I wouldn’t say Ciena is in the business of building a specific gaming product, it’s not what our customers want. What they want is help managing all of these changes. EA gaming is an application that were serving as well as any other application, but the reason we highlighted is because I don’t think people saw the amounts of disruption that it created, or the amount of traffic associated with it. That’s why we spent a lot of time on it. The next thing we’re spending a lot of time on is edge compute, and we believe a lot of time and resource and energy is now going into this. We’re hearing from customers that their investments in mobile edge computing, edge computing is skyrocketing, and it’s largely on the back of things like gaming, 5G, AR/VR and autonomous vehicles. So we believe that’s kind of the next frontier that we’re going to start working on. Our current platform serves those needs, but we believe we’ll be making additional investments over time to meet these challenges.
What is Ciena’s approach to supporting network operators with these kinds of issues? Conceptually, our theory is that you need to build networks that are more adaptive to deal with the
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unknown. Ciena’s approach is working with our operators to be able to scale the optical bandwidth when needed. Do they have the software automation resources
they need to see those problems happening? Can those software
resources adjust and control it and will it all work in a multi-vendor way because the single vendor universe is over? If you
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ISSUE 21 | Q3 2020
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