SP360: Service Provider

The digital divide has been closing over the past decade, with help from a range of federal funding programs aimed at extending broadband services to underserved areas of the country. Before you start thinking about how much funding you want or where to go to find it, it’ll help to consider how and where you want to expand broadband services and what these services will enable your customer and stakeholders to do. Then you can start looking into the funding opportunities that can help make those more concrete plans a reality.

Network economics are changing. Consumers and enterprises use more data every day, driving down the price for data services through competition and commoditization. Meanwhile, networks are getting more complex and harder to manage and operate, forcing service providers to find ways to support bandwidth growth, to deliver customer requirements faster, and to simplify operations at the same time.

Recently, I had the honor of hosting and moderating a virtual leadership roundtable featuring tech innovators planning for some of the largest, most tech-sophisticated digital entertainment venues in the world. In our conversation, we touched on the many technological innovations that are influencing business decisions right now as many teams prepare to kick-off their first-ever season without fans in stadiums.

Here in 2020, in the midst of a flourishing digital revolution, high-speed Internet connectivity is now within reach of practically everyone, everywhere, right? Not exactly. The high-tech future may be moving full steam ahead in cities and suburbs, but rural regions still face a huge digital divide. Fortunately, there’s good news on the horizon: connecting rural regions is getting easier and less expensive every year.

Learn how fiber dispersion properties limit your link data rate and distance.

Enterprise applications are quickly moving away from the data center and into the cloud. As service providers come to see this as a seismic technology shift rather than just a blip on the radar, they’re wondering how to deploy applications faster and easier while keeping them secure. AT&T recently developed a managed service offing based on our secure virtualized Software Defined–Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solution. Secure SD-WAN makes the management and operation of a WAN much simpler. It decouples networking hardware from its control mechanism using virtualization technology, allowing companies to build better performing and secure WANs.

Seems like we see news about 5G rollouts every week, with networks being “lit up” left and right. But on August 4, there was a really big announcement from T-Mobile about their launch of the world’s first nationwide standalone (SA) 5G network. So, why all the hype with this one? Simple. T-Mobile’s 5G SA is pure 5G throughout the network, providing the high bandwidth, blazing speeds, and low latency that IS the transformational promise of 5G. And the numbers speak for themselves.

Discover how Cisco Silicon One can change the environmental impact of your network.

As service providers eye network upgrades to satisfy new demands for 5G, there are several important decisions to ponder. One of the biggest questions is whether to build onto your existing 4G network as a Non-Standalone (NSA) or jump in with a Standalone (SA) network packet core to position yourself as an industry leader well into the future. The future is here, and we are fortunate to be a part of building it!