Used a fax machine in a while?

Raise your hand if you’ve used a fax machine in the last week. Or dial-up Internet. Or a land line at home. I’m guessing you haven’t used any of these things in a long time. All of them had their moments in the sun, and all were innovations in their time. But with a networking world that is becoming more converged, change happens fast, and there’s so much yet to look forward to…

The ironic thing is that as the world becomes more wireless, the more fiber networks are needed. It becomes essential to merge wireless and fixed networks. But is your network ready? Can you keep up with demand?

It’s unprecedented, really:

• Mobile data traffic has grown 18-fold over the past five years, per Cisco VNI Mobile.
• Ericsson predicts there will be 150 million 5G subscribers by 2021.
• By the end of the year, FTTH Council APAC/Ovum say there will be 30 million new broadband subscribers in Asia-Pacific alone.

Most networks have both fixed and wireless connectivity. All applications will at some point run through both. It’s the delivery of services that needs to be increasingly more efficient to manage and implement.

In the central office alone, there are a few things to consider as we move to a converged world:

• Central offices are going to have to support more services than they do today.
• Edge data center functionality will be deployed in central offices.
• Fiber management equipment needs to maximize accessibility to the outside plant fiber network.
• Equipment needs to be flexible to support evolving deployment needs.

And there are key network challenges that occur when thinking about all of this. But CommScope is here to help and look into the “crystal ball,” if you will. That’s why we’re joining Light Reading for an interactive webinar on June 21 at 10 a.m. New York / 3 p.m. London / 4 p.m. Paris. You can register for it here. We’ll explore the impact of these changes and open it up for your questions. What are you hoping to learn? Leave us a comment here.