It’s that time of year where we start to look ahead to 2022 and consider what new focuses this will bring to the industry. As the famous saying goes ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and this will certainly be the case next year as the time will finally come for businesses and ISPs to get to grips with the long-talked about data explosion.
The vast increase in data being generated across the world has been talked about for years and Statista claims 64.2 zettabytes of data was created in 2020 and predicts this to grow to a massive 180 zettabytes by 2025. To put this into context, 1 petabyte is the equivalent of 11,000 4k resolution movies and just 1 zetabyte is 1 million petabytes – the amount of data being created is truly mind-blowing!
As with many things in the last 18 months, this growth was accelerated beyond previous predictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic as an increased number of people around the globe worked and learned from home and embraced new software and technologies in their daily lives. Some of these changes to working practices are here to stay but the ongoing growth of data creation will also be added to by the expanding adoption of machine learning, AI and IoT in our ever more connected environments.
5G, which up until now has predominantly been explored only from a mobile perspective, will also bring a host of new opportunities to businesses and they will therefore be looking for partners who can reliably support this level of data without compromising security, quality or compliance.
Looking at 5G alone, the service level requirements for network partners are increasingly stringent in order for the abundance of new technological opportunities to be realised. When you consider the use of 5G in the context of smart cars or remote surgery for example, real time data transmission if vital and therefore the demands on latency and precision time protocols are strict. A latency of sub 10 milliseconds and use of precision time protocol throughout the network become a matter of life or death!
There is no getting away from the fact that all of this will require significant investment from those ISPs still operating legacy networks and it is ultimately likely to give rise to a new-look, multi-faceted ISP also combining solutions infrastructure and managed services in order to deliver the necessary robust, quality service. Quite simply, those who do not invest will get left behind but the gains for businesses which can rely on these new look partners and truly harness the opportunities presented by 5G are huge.
More tech trends for 2022
Want to know what else to expect in the world of technology in 2022? Read the other articles in the series:
