The shift towards a digital economy and society is top of mind for governments, industries, and consumers alike. This transformation aims to enhance competitiveness, drive economic growth, and enable a green transition. It has been further accelerated by the excitement around technologies like GenAI, IoT, and digital twins.
As a result, the demand for advanced digital services is growing rapidly. The Cisco Broadband Survey1 revealed that most European consumers surveyed either have, or expect to have, their cars (64%), home appliances (68%), energy (74%), and water (61%) connected to the internet.
To fulfil the potential of this digital transition, it’s critical that the underlying infrastructure is robust, secure, and capable of supporting demanding and innovative use cases. Telecommunication providers are at the heart of this evolution, as the digital infrastructure they provide is the primary enabler for digital innovation.
European Union consultation for digital infrastructure
In the wake of these needs, the European Union (EU) Commission launched a public consultation2 aimed at identifying the requirements to develop an advanced digital infrastructure. According to the consultation, this infrastructure will rely on widespread fiber and 5G coverage, complemented by satellite connectivity, and seamlessly integrated with distributed compute capabilities to create a compute continuum.
The EU assessment reveals that the current EU infrastructure is not ready to meet the challenges of the digital economy and of society. It estimates that an investment of EUR 200 billion is needed for connectivity until 2030, and an additional EUR 80 billion is required to close the cloud gap by 2027. However, telecommunication providers are struggling to secure financing and are experiencing relatively low average revenue per user (ARPU) when compared to other advanced markets. According to the assessment, investors are looking for higher profitability, which is linked to the development and adoption of new use cases, only possible with capable digital networks.
Solving this paradigm is complex and requires a fresh approach to building digital networks.
Autonomous networks for resilient digital infrastructure
To build an intelligent, resilient, secure digital infrastructure, the industry is evolving and adopting the concept of autonomous networks. Cisco, as a leader in this space and an enabler of this transformation, identifies three foundational pillars to successfully evolve existing networks. These include:
- Network Simplification—Automated, programmable, intelligent infrastructure for AI and telco workloads
Simplification can be achieved via multiple pillars. One is the ability to collapse IP and optical network layers via technologies such as Cisco RON (Routed Optical Networking). The other is the ability to converge multiple access networks onto a single, seamless, resilient network. By achieving service convergence in this way, all user traffic can be offered different network characteristics via “Network Slices” using enhanced technologies such as Segment Routing and Flex Algorithm. Although more simplified, network differentiation can be achieved at any desired point in the network through the built-in seamless network intelligence that can be flexibly enabled via the common hardware, software, and automation. This network infrastructure empowers the telecommunication providers to have full control and visibility over the end-to-end path, which strengths their differentiation opportunity in the market.
- Automation and Assurance—Using intelligent data and AI to deliver Self-X capabilities with Zero-X experience
The delivery of full automation and orchestration of this converged network is a mandatory step on the road to autonomous networks. The automation abstracts the specificities of the network components, delivers faster introduction of services, and guarantees service and network lifecycle management and assurance in a closed loop. The closed loop operations use the intelligent data and telemetry extracted from every layer of the infrastructure. Visibility capabilities can be extended to go beyond the telecommunication provider’s infrastructure and provide insights into the end-to-end user experience. The analysis of all this data can drive remediation actions or service optimization enforcements that can be automatically applied to the network. Building assurance into the network is another key step on this journey. When the data collected is combined with AI capabilities, higher levels of automation can be achieved wherein the decision engines acquire a cognitive understanding of the network that is then used to detect and react to new and unknown situations. All these tools and processes being put in place throughout the network serve as the baseline for AIOps.
- Data Intelligence and AI—Turning rich data into intelligent analytics and clear insights
The real power of data is achieved when it’s possible to analyze and correlate different events from different domains, different layers, other partner data, and the ability to act on them. Full visibility and control over the digital experience is achieved by building intelligent capabilities into the network across all domains, hardware, and software. This generates large amounts of intelligence data, which only needs to be ingested once into a data platform in order for it to be consumed many times. This is the work of a data intelligence platform like Splunk, which can provide intelligent analytics and real-time insights for consumption by business applications, back-office applications, or any third-party platform.
Conclusion
The transition to a digital society demands an intelligent digital infrastructure that can do more with less. Telecommunication providers can achieve this by simplifying their networks while equipping themselves with enhanced capacity, unmatched control, and deep visibility. These capabilities are powerful differentiators in the services delivery ecosystem. A telecommunication provider’s competitive advantage lies in its unique position to determine where and how the traffic flows, establish where it is processed and stored, assess corresponding performance, and harvest large amounts of data that can be transformed into valuable insights and actions. And then offer these powerful capabilities to a diverse ecosystem of partners through open and unified APIs.
Overlay services provided by over-the-top players are completely dependent on an underlay connectivity service to reach their customers. An intelligent underlay infrastructure allows them to offer a differentiated service with an assured SLA to critical business-to-business applications, which they alone cannot deliver.
1- About the Cisco Broadband Survey
The Cisco Broadband Survey is based on a survey of 21,629 workers across 12 countries: UK, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, UAE and the Netherlands. It was completed during January and February 2023. The sample included respondents based in every region of each country, who either work full-time remotely; full-time in an office; hybrid, between home and the office; or on the frontline. The poll was conducted by independent research consultancy Censuswide, who abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society - which is based on the ESOMAR principles.
