Current Situation and Future of Traditional Communication Industry

1. Status Quo of the Traditional Communication Industry

Now there is a voice in the industry that the traditional communication industry has declined. The telecommunications industry as a whole is weak and somewhat desolate as the sun sets. As an industry insider, I have thought about the past and present of the communications industry, and I think the main reasons are as follows:

1. The development of the industry cannot keep up with the changes of the times.

With the development of the Internet and mobile Internet, the data exchange requirements of some enterprises have far exceeded that of operators. Take Google, for example, massive amounts of data definitely need disaster recovery backups, and there may be more than one backup for safety and reliability. It is impossible to use traditional communication modes for such data communication. Why do you say that? A traditional communication industry is to sell equipment, usually the cost of software is added to the hardware, plus itself is in a monopoly position, each equipment is very expensive to sell, I remember in 2012, a Huawei NE5KE High-end routers cost tens of millions of yuan. Such a huge data exchange demand as Google requires a lot of such high-end equipment, and even a large international company with deep pockets like Google is not willing to pay such a high cost. Second, traditional communication equipment is not flexible enough. In an application scenario like Google, the storage server will be an array cluster, and the members in it will change frequently. If traditional communication equipment is used, any changes may cause changes in the network, which requires artificial Deployment planning. A big data company like Google cannot accept such a complex approach.

2. Big data companies such as Amazon and Google make their own communication equipment, which not only fulfills their own needs, but also greatly improves efficiency, posing a great threat to traditional communication companies.

At the beginning, Google could propose to make its own software to achieve upper-level control, while the communication company's equipment only did data forwarding. The communication company will not agree to such a request. If there is no complicated software control, the equipment of the communication company is no different from a whiteboard, and the operators are not stupid. Who would spend a lot of money to buy this kind of equipment? The Googles are moving the cheese of the communications company.

However, the communication companies disagree that it is useless, and the technically strong Google can do it. Their underlying hardware uses third-party whiteboard equipment, and the control plane is completely implemented by themselves, which fully realizes flexible deployment and plug-and-play. What's more terrifying is that the bandwidth utilization rate of traditional communication companies' equipment is generally only 40%, and the bandwidth utilization rate controlled by Google's software can reach 90%. It can be said that Google has revolutionized the traditional communication industry.

2. The future of traditional communication industry

1. How to deal with threats from Google

Operators are not fools. They also demand to reduce the cost of equipment and improve bandwidth utilization like Google. But in the short term, operators, especially large operators, cannot relocate equipment and change networks on a large scale. At this time, the response strategy of communication companies is often to optimize the network and improve the bandwidth utilization. Like the SDN proposed now, communication providers often add additional equipment for centralized control, and the original equipment is generally unchanged. This has to be said to be a bit of a delusional ingredient. The industry leader Cisco has even put forward new protocols such as SR, trying to gain the right to speak in terms of standards and break through the threats of Google. From the current development, the situation is not too clear.

2. Farther into the future

I think the future network is likely to be like what Google does, the equipment is very simple, and it will be a forwarding engine. All control planes are handed over to communication companies or Googles, and are managed and deployed flexibly through cloud computing, big data storage, etc. Operators do not need to worry about software control and operation and maintenance at all, and hardware costs are also extremely low.

I think communication companies may not be afraid to transform into software companies, they are worried about losing their monopoly and first-mover advantage. The threshold of the communication industry is lowered, and software companies can also do it. Moreover, in the field of cloud computing, Google and Amazon in the world, Ali and Tencent in China are far more than communication companies.

3. The development of traditional communication engineers

(1) Learn more about new knowledge such as SDN, virtualization, cloud computing, SR protocol, etc., do a good job in knowledge reserve, and respond to changes in the industry.

(2) To develop in the field of mobile communication.