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If you’re reading this, chances are your Internet still works.

Usually, your broadband is like your electricity: you don’t notice it unless it’s not working. But if you’re like millions of people around the world, your broadband is working just fine—even though you’re home all day, video conferencing with people you don’t even normally talk to, while you binge-watch all of the Internet.

In fact, that’s the case for most Internet users—our Internet habits over the past two months have changed completely. Broadband rush hour used to be 8pm-12am (4 hours). Today, it’s 8am-2am (18 hours). Just a couple months ago, the average household consumed an average of 2.4 Mbps in the downstream during the busy period at night. Today, it uses up to 3.0 Mbps during that same period.

This is the second in a two-part blog series on analytics, specifically for network administrators. The first part was posted on May 12, 2020.

Let’s begin with incident prioritization. What is incident prioritization, and why is it valuable? 

From a network administrator’s point of view, certain issues are more critical than others, and will therefore be deemed more severe and appropriately prioritized. When troubleshooting manually, network administrators typically consider several factors to determine the severity of an issue, such as:

• What parts of the network are/were impacted?
• How many clients are/were impacted?
• If not ongoing, how long did the incident last?

This blog was previously published in Datacenter Dynamics on Oct. 18, 2019.

Till now, the lines of demarcation influencing the design and role of a data center were, at least somewhat, clear and consistent. The local service area tended to reach out about 150 miles, give or take. Inside the data center, resources such as compute and storage capacity, as well as the links connecting the data center to the access network, were designed based on a predictable traffic load.

2019 was a year for digital transformation across a number of areas and industries – and the data center market was no exception. Under increasing pressure to stay relevant and keep up with rapidly advancing technologies, data center providers saw a need to transform and prepare for what’s to come.

Now, as we head into 2020, the outcomes of the adoption of both newer and more mature technologies will start to take shape in the data center. Specifically, we’ll see 5G drive an increase in demand for edge computing, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) will heighten deployment of new services in this market for both the end user and internal employees.

With that, here are our top three predictions for the data center market in 2020.

If you watch TV, use a smartphone, or go online—you probably use equipment designed by CommScope’s engineers. We are a critical piece in communications networks, which are the most economically beneficial enabling industry in the history of humanity. The products and solutions that we design matter this week and every week.

Networks touch almost every part of our daily lives and when things are working well, it’s easy to see that we take their reliability for granted. At CommScope, we understand that for network operators, network reliability is absolute vital because the broadband network carries multiple high value services and needs to satisfy the needs of a variety of customers. Today, network reliability is a primary and growing competitive differentiator for network operators.

Digital transformation, the “internet of things” and our high-speed future all rely on the scalability of the infrastructure behind them. Network providers must design and deploy enterprise data centers, not only to keep pace with technological advancements, but also to anticipate new trends and standards. Meet the need for speed and streamline your high-speed migration with agile data center installation. 

(Note: The following has been submitted as a guest post to CommScope Blogs by Danny Cohen, account manager at LINX. LINX is a member of CommScope’s PartnerPRO Network and provider of IT networking solutions in the United States. Opinions and comments provided in this guest post, as with all posts to CommScope Blogs, are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CommScope.)

It’s hard to imagine what the future will look like. 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t get too many things right. I mean we didn’t even get the iPhone until 2007. Flying around space with an AI computer still seems far out, even on today’s standards. Stanley Kubrick took a risk in predicting the future of technology. Some things take off like mini computers that fit in my pocket and talking thermostat. Others seems to die before becoming real. It’s 2019, where is my flying car?

The landscape in cities is changing rapidly. They are challenged with issues around the following items:

• Lighting
• Transportation
• Parking
• Safety and security
• Waste management
• The environment

A long time ago, you could make a phone call using a phone booth. I especially recall the red telephone booths used in the United Kingdom. After the cellphone was introduced, no longer were the famous red telephone booths (or any phonebooths) needed to make calls.

Roof-mounted structures are increasingly in demand across the U.S., as there is often limited space in major metropolitan areas for fully developed tower sites. The key issue is providing adequate assurance to building owners that additional loads imposed by these structures can withstand the extra weight. 

With the rising demand for 5G service and devices, networks must expand to meet the demand for better and faster coverage. Outdoor small cells comprise an integral part of these service increasing deployments, but the issue still remains, how do we efficiently position this newly required infrastructure?

In my previous post, I argued that the growth of multi-operator in-building cellular services depend on three factors: 1) operator willingness to look at new operational models; 2) common, cross-operator technical solutions, and 3) deployment and service management expertise. In this follow-on post, I’ll elaborate on each.

A growing economy and surging population in India are causing city congestion, including a worsening traffic condition. According to a 2018 study on worst traffic flow in the world, Mumbai and Delhi came in first and fourth respectively among the list of 403 cities across 56 countries.

Now more than ever network connectivity is foundational to business, and to buildings and campuses. It has become a critical utility, like power and water. Network connectivity is the path to network reliability, and it requires special attention because the implications of poorly planned or executed network connectivity can seriously limit the potential of your organization and cause catastrophic system failures. From business applications and life safety systems to operational technology and user applications, connectivity enables the important functions of buildings and organizations.

Just as sharks must keep swimming to survive, data center operators are continually hunting for more capacity to meet the ever-growing demands of application requirements and user expectations. Right now, optical technologies comfortably support lane speeds of 50 Gb/s for multimode fiber with 100 Gb/s lanes soon to follow. Like sharks, the data center's appetite for higher bandwidth and lower latency—in the core and access networks—is insatiable.

In their search for bigger, faster pipes, network operators are currently focusing on two areas: improved optics and the increasing use of multiplexing. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Many of the most attractive technologies involve both multiplexing and improved optics. We’ll get to that in just a moment, but for now, let’s focus on multiplexing.

The following blog post has been provided by A Nicolas Phily, Project Director and Philippe Jaillet, Radio Engineer at Orange. As with all CommScope-hosted blog posts, any opinions or comments below are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CommScope.

Lyon is a big city. In fact, after Paris, it’s the second largest metropolitan area in all of France. With 200 million riders annually across the system’s 32 kilometers of railways, the Métro de Lyon is a daily part of life for the city’s busy population.

Our new “work-from-home reality” is now part of our lives. During these times, we rely on our home networks more than ever.

Not only is connectivity important, but a safe and reliable network is vital. According to the American Consumer Institute last year, more than 83 percent of older home and office routers have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.

It is important you take the necessary steps to make sure you home network device has the most up-to-date patches and security safeguards. Did you know that in a study conducted by Tripwire, it found that less than 50 percent of IT professionals recently updated the router firmware in their homes? Surprisingly, only 32 percent even knew how to perform such an update.

“How do you put an elephant in the fridge?” No, this is not a rhetorical question or a joke. Candidates who applied to work for Gemalto, a digital security company, were asked for a response to this seemingly irrelevant question during a job interview.

Still thinking about how you’d respond?

This would be my answer: Open the fridge, put the elephant in and close the fridge! Puzzled? This is the same type of mentality applied to daily customer challenges across the data center industry. The answer may not seem straight forward but with lateral thinking, deductive reasoning and smart management tools, we make things happen.

Not that it should come as a shock, but cloud applications are mushrooming like mid-summer thunderstorms. For data centers, this is the uneasy calm before the storm.

According to the 2018 Global Cloud Index[i], global cloud data center traffic is projected to reach 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021—up from just 6 ZB in 2016. That 19.5 ZBs will account for 95 percent of all data center traffic by 2021. That’s not just data passing through the data center; by 2021, about 1.3 ZBs will be stored in the data center—more than five times the storage volume needed in 2016.

"A goal without a plan, is just a wish," is one of the phrases of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of "The Little Prince," and it’s a phrase with which I began my talk, "Envisioning The Future.” Why? Well, today there are several trends that are impacting data centers, and although corporate administrators and directors want to embrace these trends, the managers must first know the trends and know each other before they can turn that dream into a goal with a specific plan.

Companies today are listening to many things, which makes everything difficult to process. For example, the change in business models and 5G connectivity is increasing network deployments, and data growth is driving cloud use. All this impacts the way managers should see and plan for the future.

While 5G is starting to be deployed in 2019, a lot of people are asking questions about how 5G will be realized.

We’ve heard about the promise of 5G for years – how it will be faster and more efficient – but it wasn’t until 2019 that we saw the first, small signs of rollout around the world. While we wait for additional cities to come online and 5G devices to be introduced, we believe 2020 will be the kickoff to a more connected future.

Here at CommScope, we’re obsessed with progress. Our innovation reflects not only our vision for tomorrow’s technology, but for tomorrow’s world. And we envision a world where technology is as powerful as it is sustainable.

As part of our ongoing efforts to reduce our impact on the environment, we’ve been eliminating single-use plastics from our packaging and product designs—specifically for our service provider customer premises equipment and Ruckus branded products.

There’s a rise in the number of devices being connected to the network in buildings, and the kinds of devices being connected vary widely, from computers and IP phones to cameras, digital signage, and sensors that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Operational Technology (OT) network. We’re seeing a convergence of these devices on twisted-pair cabling, but the requirements for these devices introduce some variables into the equation that make connections difficult for installers. For example, installers may not be familiar with structured cabling installation practices and how to meet each device’s requirements: some devices may need high power, while others might need low power. Some devices might need high bandwidth, while others might need low bandwidth or any combination thereof.

More than 227 miles of fiber and 1.5 million feet of copper cable installed in new home of the Las Vegas Raiders

CommScope has announced that its fiber optic and copper cabling has been installed in Allegiant Stadium, the new 65,000-seat home of the Las Vegas Raiders. The 227 miles of fiber and more than 1.5 million feet of copper is helping to create the ultimate experience for Raiders fans by supporting over 2,400 screens, 1,700 Wi-Fi 6 access points, and Allegiant Stadium’s Distributed Antenna System (DAS). The 100G fiber backbone and 10G CAT 6A copper will deliver connectivity for critical stadium systems and applications such as high-resolution security cameras, fire and safety, HVAC and lighting controls, wayfinding, ticketing, concessions, merchandise, and parking.

This is the first in a two-part blog series on analytics, specifically for network administrators. The second part will run on May 18.

Ensuring a superior client experience is a top priority for network administrators. To achieve this, network administrators continuously assess network health in three primary areas: connection, performance and infrastructure.

The densification of outdoor networks is necessary to support the higher speeds and lower latencies of 5G. In real-world terms, the densification process typically involves significantly increasing the number of small cell sites within a specific urban area. However, as Light Reading’s Mike Dano points out, the proliferation of small cells “raises the specter of unsightly […] mechanical gizmos looming over neighborhoods around the country.” This is precisely why it is so important for operators and vendors to work with municipalities to aesthetically conceal small cell deployments associated with 5G rollouts.

This blog was first published in Datacenter Dynamics on Sepember 5, 2019.  

At the heart of any technology purchase is the question: Will it do the job?  Before considering anything else, including price, you must ensure that the solution being considered will serve the intended function. That may sound obvious! But when the product is perceived as a commodity, functionality is often assumed—even with something as critical as fiber.

CommScope today announced open interfaces, virtualized RAN functions, and new radio points for its OneCell small cell to provide an innovative and open approach for operators to deploy 5G networks in enterprises and venues.

It’s common knowledge that two people can look at the very same object and see two very different things. It's how our brain works. It combines new information -- the object in front of us -- with memories stored in the brain from the past.

With the holiday season approaching, think for just a second of past boxes you’ve received. Now, didn’t you like it when you opened one and found there was ‘no assembly required’? It’s all put together, you just took it out of the box and whatever was inside just worked?

The future of broadband networks is 10G. But the most exciting developments of 2020 will be real-world improvements to speed, capacity, and efficiency coming to networks around the world.

This year saw the beginnings of multi-gigabit speeds, network virtualization and automation, and software-defined networks that push computing ever closer to the premises. These offer great promise for tomorrow’s smart home services, smart cities, enterprise networks, and more.

In 2020, four key trends will move us closer to those goals while making meaningful improvements in the way that operators manage their networks and consumers experience broadband.

2019 saw the introduction of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 products, the long-awaited launch of 5G devices and services, the initial commercial rollout of shared spectrum, as well as increased global interest in private networks. In 2020, we expect these new standards, products and services to drive the demand for more bandwidth and more power over ethernet (PoE) for edge devices across a wide range of connected spaces. These include smart homes and cities, intelligent buildings and stadiums, as well as mining sites, factories and warehouses.

2019 saw the introduction of Wi-Fi 6 CERTIFIED products, the deployment of shared spectrum, availability of 5G handsets and service in select cities, and an uptick in interest for private networks. These new standards, products and services will give enterprises more choices in 2020 as to how they meet increased demands for both capacity and coverage, as well as meet increased end-user expectations. 

Is the 10G broadband drumbeat a real call to arms or the usual thumping of a ubiquitous hype machine?