By Mylaraiah J N, Director, Enterprise Sales, India & SAARC, CommScope
By 2022, 28.5 billion fixed and mobile personal devices and connections will help drive global IP traffic to reach 4.7 zettabytes annually. The expanding edge computing environment featuring greater processing power, storage and other advanced capabilities will establish robust communications back to centralized services.
These trends are intensely reliant on broadband fiber, copper and wireless as well as powered connectivity. I see the following trends to significantly impact enterprise infrastructure cabling strategies in 2019 and beyond.
Trend 1: Edge, fog and serverless computing redefines cloud computing and increases the criticality of always-on connectivity
As more computing services and data are moved to the edge of the network, businesses will expand via cloud and co-location services, even more so with escalating real estate cost in urban hubs. Efficient structured cabling with high-performance copper and fibre connectivity is required to accommodate the huge data flows that will be generated at the edge.
Trend 2: Power over Ethernet (PoE) becoming powering strategy for wider array of higher-wattage devices and IoT applications
Supporting devices that deliver faster network speeds or more power require the right cabling and network design. Given the higher wattage of 4PPoE technology, potential overheating issues affecting transmission performance and safety of structured cabling systems are important considerations to support next-generation PoE applications in different real-world installation conditions and sustainable green initiatives.
Trend 3: Business use cases for single-pair Ethernet is emerging
Extending beyond use cases in the automotive industry and in several industrial applications, Single Pair Ethernet offers a cost-effective transport for power, connectivity and security to the billions of IoT edge devices that will be deployed over the next decade. Because the bulk of IoT devices being deployed do not require as much bandwidth and power as a typical application using traditional 4-pair cabling, single-pair Ethernet promises to provide a more compact and economical solution.
Trend 4: High-density fiber connectivity supports continuing trend toward 200/400G backbone
Early implementations of 400G uplinks and backbones may happen by 2020. Enterprises will pursue 400GbE-ready network densification strategies to pack more capacity into less space as server densities and processor capabilities increased. Advances in technology now allow the specification of 400 Gbps physical layer types to increase in multimode fiber capacity.
Trend 5: Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax making its way into new installations
Wi-Fi 6 is designed to allow for wireless data rates up to 10 Gbps and to operate in today’s increasingly congested radio environments, such as airports, stadiums, hotels, apartment, and commercial buildings and entertainment venues. Wi-Fi 6’s support of multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology enables any compatible access point to handle traffic from up to eight users simultaneously at the same speed. Still, enterprises can only realize Wi-Fi 6’s true benefits with the right cabling infrastructure out to the WAP. To deliver the bandwidth needed, the TSB-162-A standard recommends running two Category 6A cabling to each service outlet supporting a WAP.
