Why Service Providers Are Evolving Their Metro Networks Now?

0:04 Welcome to Juniper Cloud Metro series, where we have experts to

0:08 answer your questions, any questions related to next-gen

0:12 Metro networks. I'm your host, Irene Zhang, Director of Product

0:16 Marketing at Juniper. Joining me today is Amit Bhardwaj, Senior

0:20 Director of Product Line Management at Juniper.

0:22 Amit, Welcome. Today we have a question about why service

0:27 providers are evolving their metro networks now?

0:31 Service providers are looking at, you know, how some of these

0:36 use cases are going to evolve for them. You know, video

0:39 continues to be a big driver from a network traffic

0:43 perspective, and made videos getting distributed into the

0:47 metro locations with more and more caching happening.

0:50 5G is a major driver, because 5G not only brings more traffic,

0:55 more number of devices, you know, but 5G also brings new

0:58 architectures, where the 5G infrastructure from a RAN

1:02 perspective or from a core perspective is a virtual

1:06 infrastructure.

1:08 And then, you know, the last but the biggest, the most important

1:13 might be the enablement of new use cases. The new use cases or

1:18 around the workloads that get hosted into the metro locations.

1:22 And many cloud providers actually have dedicated teams

1:26 working on these use cases, where some of the analysts

1:29 expecting over 30% of these workloads would be hosted into

1:33 the metro.

1:34 So data centers are basically moving where the customers are.

1:37 That's why service providers are evolving their networks, to

1:41 evolve their networks to when this happens, there's a big

1:45 transition, you know, how the traffic patterns change, because

1:49 traditionally, everything is backhaul. So all the traffic

1:52 flows are sort of North and Sorth. But now, you know, with

1:57 this use case is being hosted in the metro, the traffic patterns

2:00 become more and more east and west, within the metro.

2:04 So as a result of that, the bandwidth in the metro is going

2:08 to grow really, really fast, much faster than other parts of

2:11 the network. So the customers, or the service providers have to

2:15 upgrade the networks to to deliver these new capacities,

2:19 and with the architectures that not only address the traditional

2:22 backhaul use cases, but also the new use cases with

2:26 virtualization of infrastructure, and also with

2:29 the edge compute. So it's really a transition for them from a

2:33 business perspective. That's why they are evolving this.

2:37 And the last thing I want to say is, I mean, as they evolve their

2:41 Metro networks, it also drives new revenue streams for service

2:46 providers. Right. Traditionally, when everything is backhauled,

2:49 all the traffic is over the top. So the monetization of that is

2:53 very difficult for service providers because they are a

2:55 conduit or a pipe in the middle. And all the monetization happens

2:59 in the cloud.

2:59 When the cloud moves where the service providers are sitting,

3:02 those pipes are not just over the top, they will have

3:05 dedicated SLAs, which means there's better monetization

3:08 models for the bandwidth. Service providers have the real

3:13 estate. So it gives them an opportunity in partnerships with

3:16 the cloud providers to generate new revenue streams around these

3:19 new use cases. So it's both the business need that's driving

3:23 this. And then architecturally is really about becoming more

3:26 flexible from an architecture standpoint to evolve the metro

3:29 networks to the cloud Metro architectures.

3:33 Thank you, Amit.

3:35 What else do you want to learn about the next generation Metro

3:38 networks? Send us your question by email at metroAMA@juniper.net

3:44 and join us at our monthly live AMA session. You can find the

3:47 date and registration link at the description box below. See

3:52 you next time.