How The Network Is Changing The Digital Age | WIRED Brand Lab

[lively music]

[Narrator] The network is growing

at an unprecedented rate.

Today every industry, from health care

to retail to manufacturing

is transitioning to the network

and thanks to new technologies like artificial intelligence

and the Internet of Things,

their activity on the network

is multifaceted and complex

producing more data and using more bandwidth

than ever before but without major changes

to the network's infrastructure,

this expansion is unsustainable.

In the past, the way networks were built

were software running on specialty hardware

which made it very reliable

but also made it more costly and harder to scale.

[Narrator] That's Mobeen Khan.

He's the director of strategy and product management

for the Internet of Things at AT&T.

The network is a web of data connections

and is growing quickly.

New technologies like artificial intelligence

and the Internet of Things are creating more connections,

taxing the network's capacity.

[Narrator] And Craig Farrell.

He's vice-president and chief technology officer

of IBM's Global Telecom Industry.

They see the need for a new type of network,

one that can break the cycle of upgrade costs

to increase network capacity,

required by the ever-growing consumer demand for data.

Fortunately through the cloud,

virtualization and 5G technology,

this network is already taking shape,

so what is this new network replacing?

Here's an analogy.

[Craig] You walk into your home

and there's a box over there,

say it's your DVR, it's a piece of physical equipment.

But there's no reason why it has to be a physical box.

You could store it away anywhere,

you could store it on a cloud.

Now you can access the content anywhere in the world

just by connecting to your home network.

It's all done in software.

[Narrator] The same transition

is happening to the network

with cloud and virtualization.

The legacy hardware service providers used in the past

is being turned into software

to meet the needs of organizations across industries

who are looking to consume services at a renewed scale.

[Mobeen] We want to consume them anywhere

on any device where we are.

The right way to do that

is through network virtualization

and through software-defined network components

that will allow us to produce services,

manage services on these networks,

in a much, much faster way

and are much more efficient.

[Narrator] This ability to rapidly scale bandwidth

will be necessary to support 5G

which promises speeds up to 10 times

that of 4G and latencies no longer than a millisecond.

With the cloud and virtualization,

5G networks will be able to access the capacity they need

to meet demand.

[Craig] Where to point in the telecom industry

where we're seeing 50-year-old companies disappear

in a blink because the status quo has changed.

Today's service providers need to be in the IoT business.

They need to be in the media and entertainment business,

the healthcare business and so on.

The good news is once these technologies are implemented,

the cost of doing business will become manageable

and the providers that have made the investment

in the network will remain competitive

in this ever-changing landscape.

[Narrator] Cloud, virtualization, and 5G

will usher in a new digital age,

one with advanced technology,

like virtual reality, self-driving cars,

the ever proliferating IoT and much, much more.

[Craig] We're working towards a future

where technology will actually work.

We're gonna harness all the data

and all of these connections to make meaningful changes

in people's lives.

I think we're only just beginning

to discover the possibilities.