Open Network Featured Article

One of the primary goals in computing that underlines every discipline is usability. Without a clear path to new mobile services, consumers will not use them. Furthermore, without a clear path to mobile service development, service providers will shy away from the creation process.

It is usability that SK Telecom (News - Alert) spoke about at this year’s Open Networking Summit. Its senior vice president, Kang-Won Lee, commented that it wants to transform into a platform company that uses datacenters to help speed adoption of new services and give telecoms the power to create new services that they can expect to launch without hindrance.

Here are his own words from the conference:

“We need to transition the current telco infrastructure into more of a datacenter infrastructure with wireless connectivity at the end so introduction of new services becomes more agile and faster with new services,” Lee said. “Average LTE (News - Alert) data usage per user per month is expected to increase by five times over the next four years which presents a significant challenge for a network operator like us.”

Just as Lee has mentioned, 4G adoption across the globe has reached unprecedented heights. A report from Cisco (News - Alert) earlier this year showed that 4G accounted for one billion of the 7.3 billion connections made in 2015. In large part, most of the growth took place in developing countries , which will also help fuel the growth of the market to a predicted nine billion mobile connections by 2020.

Lee also spoke about the rise of 5G and how it will impact global data use. He noted that telecoms should begin to prepare for a 5G-enabled world that will arrive by the end of the decade. This prediction lines up with ABI Research’s (News - Alert) recent study that figures the market will reach $247 billion by 2025 after 5G deployments begin to gain serious traction five years before that mark.

What can the move from a telecom infrastructure to a datacenter infrastructure mean for service providers and consumers? If Lee is correct, consumer and business traffic will have the chance to double their traffic growth while also witnessing a 10-fold drop in latency. This will also come with greater support for mobile devices. In the end, it is clear that users will see higher access speeds to their desired services.

Service providers should then begin to see a greater output of services from the industry. They will know they can reach consumers and business clients more quickly, so they will have an incentive to develop more programs for all types of end users. SK Telecom said that the use of open source projects and virtual networking can help reduce costs and simplify network design so everything runs as smoothly as possible.