< PreviousFrom Smart Cities to a Smart Planet SMART BUILDINGS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 20To do that, smart cities need to collect data, lots of it. But they need to do it efficiently and cost-effectively, and when you’re talking about a city-wide network, that’s easier said than done. However, the advent of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies such as LoRaWAN provide a long-range link that enables sensors to be placed far beyond the reach of, and at substantially less cost than, equivalent wired connections. Moreover, the energy requirements for these wireless sensors are massively reduced because of their battery lifetime. Low-power sensors communicate to a handful of gateways that feed the collected data into a centralised enterprise software system that enables real-time monitoring of events and conditions throughout the city. This can help do everything from easing traffic congestion to enhancing public safety or detecting and preventing a fire hazard. Smart cities in action There are already numerous examples of cities around the world that are taking advantage of the benefits that this wireless technology can bring. One example is Frankfurt am Main in western Germany which has adopted a smart city strategy that encompasses initiatives such as intelligent traffic control, digital access to the city library, and the capture of environmental and health data. To support the increasing data traffic that these projects will generate, Loriot, a global IoT company, has installed a professional public server in the city to provide a reliable, enterprise-grade service across the city’s network. With cities growing in population all over the world, they need to get smarter about how they manage resources like energy and water, cut waste and pollution, manage traffic and transport, and keep citizens safe and healthy. Alistair Fulton Semtech Corporation s et SMART BUILDINGS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 21But it’s not only a case of just using LPWAN to improve infrastructure. The US city of Cary, North Carolina, is taking it a step further in conjunction with Semtech and the SAS Institute, a multinational developer of analytics software based in the city. They have established a dedicated IoT centre of excellence designed to take the information and analytic and operational experience it collects to improve the lives of its local citizens and to use it to advance the science of edge-to-Cloud IoT solutions. LPWAN technology, because of its low cost, flexibility and long range, can provide demonstrable benefits for small towns, too. For example, the city of Saint Grégoire, France, with only 9,700 residents, has installed its own city-wide wireless network that is being used to reduce building energy consumption by 20%, cut CO2 emissions and make using the city’s services more convenient, including 68 energy-use sensors and 150 parking-spot sensors. And it’s not just sensing the availability of parking spaces, as useful as that is, that forms the bedrock of a smart city network’s benefits. Everyday utility companies derive substantial benefits from the crucial ability to ensure the safe and efficient management of power distribution. Data is essential to utilities looking to automate their processes. Intermittent or unreliable connectivity severely limits the ability of utility companies to make any useful impact on their business and the communities they serve. LPWAN technology changes all that. It can, for example, link thousands, or even millions of smart meters cost-effectively, reliably and securely. This enables utilities to expand their business by offering secure and most importantly, reliable automated applications for smart cities and communities that cuts costs and improves safety. An example of such critical safety improvements is a solution offered by eLichens based in Grenoble, France. Its avolta-CH4 is a natural gas leak detector that runs on the LoRaWAN standard. With its low power and long- distance capabilities, eLichens found the technology ideal for giving instant alerts of any serious gas leak, thus enabling rapid responses that can save lives. From smart homes … The trail of usefulness doesn’t stop at a city, town or neighbourhood level. Individual homeowners are increasingly adopting smart home technology to manage and secure services like heating, lighting, security and entertainment. A new report from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight found that the number of smart homes in Europe and North America reached 105 million in 2021. And this growth is expected to continue. By 2026, the study anticipates around 100 million European homes will be “smart” homes as users increasingly insist on seamless connectivity from anywhere on their premises, which can be best achieved with battery-powered, long- range and low-power IoT connectivity solutions offered by LPWAN. For example, Semtech’s LoRa technology is already providing long-range, low bandwidth connectivity for Amazon Sidewalk, the crowd-sourced wireless network that extends the range of a customer’s home network to connect both outdoor and indoor smart home products, including smart lights, pet trackers, asset tracking sensors and smart irrigation. … to a smart planet, where cities can thrive Getting from farm to market has always been fraught with logistical details and nuances that can impact the success, or failure, of supply and demand chains. The advent of LPWAN technologies provide a long-range link that enables sensors to be placed far beyond the reach of, and at substantially less cost than, equivalent wired connections. SMART BUILDINGS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 22This goes for all types of goods, not just produce. And the increasing adoption of “just-in-time” supply routes puts further pressure on businesses to deliver, whatever those goods may be, quickly and efficiently without negatively impacting the health of the planet, its cities and towns, and those who live and work in them. LPWAN technologies are already enabling individuals in numerous cities, towns and municipalities to live and work in a responsible way by having the data at their disposal to make often automated informed decisions. According to a recent World Economic Forum report, IoT Guidelines for Sustainability, 84% of IoT deployments are currently addressing, or have the potential to address, sustainable development goals as defined by the United Nations. These goals include ensuring access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy for everyone; making cities inclusive, safe, reliant and sustainable; and ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. We have a long way to go in deploying even more beneficial smart city technologies and applications, but LPWAN technologies are accelerating our ability to get where we need to be faster, and more sustainably and inexpensively than had previously been thought possible. SMART BUILDINGS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 23So Direct Internet Access (DIA) is not quite so direct after all. The traffic is on the same provider network as all the MPLS traffic is delivered over: the same sets of cables in the ground, the same exchanges, the same back haul circuits, the same PoPs, the same NNIs, and, in most cases, to the same Internet peering. In the UK, Internet access is highly likely to be happening in either London or Manchester or in some cases, in one of the smaller regional exchanges. These locations are also where it is most sensible for service providers to host centralised firewalls. Let’s start by exploding a few common myths that can and do serve to confuse the market: MPLS is more expensive This is perhaps the most incorrect statement of all when it comes to the UK WAN market. The underlying network costs are identical because it’s the same network. Moreover, the CPE devices to manage MPLS connections are typically lower-end and most cost-effective, This is especially true if an organisation wishes to provide enhanced security options such as Unified Threat Management. In addition, peering charges for Internet peering do still exist, as do charges for public IP addresses, so in truth, if you are not considering sites in other countries then MPLS should, in fact, be more cost-effective. In the UK market, fewer and fewer providers are attempting to charge a premium for MPLS services. Mark Dulling Senior Solutions Architect MLL Telecom Underlay Networking Exploding the Myths Much is made in the marketplace about the logical layer 2/3 delivery of connectivity to customer sites. However, especially in the UK market, from the perspective of a service provider, the logical delivery makes little or no difference. The underlying networks that carry the traffic between sites and The internet are exactly the same, regardless of their logical (layer 3) delivery. NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 24king NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 25MPLS is old hat The traditional benefits of MPLS still hold true today. MPLS is more secure than an Internet-based network because it is delivered as an entirely private network, therefore ingress points for threat actors to target are also far fewer. It offers greater overall traffic control by allowing and honouring QoS class of service markings. This also means that traffic management can be employed from the end-user device all the way through to the application server or the cloud ingress point. It should be recognised that I am referring to the underlay only here. Services such as SD-WAN or Zero trust networking can be overlayed on any underlay network that has the appropriate access, to bring their traffic management capabilities as well. The two parts don’t even necessarily have to be supplied by the same provider, though it can be sub-optimal to deal with multiple vendors of course. The point is that the underlay and overlay are completely independent. It’s either MPLS or Direct Internet Access This should no longer be true of any modern UK service provider. Agile UK providers should be able to provide both on the same connectivity and choose the best option on a per-application basis. An example of where an organisation might truly see benefit from using DIA connectivity would be a Zero Trust model. In sites where there are very small numbers of users, on known devices, this might be used to remove the cost of SD-WAN devices from the network as a whole. Even then some devices such as IoT or legacy hardware on- site hardware might be an issue. In fact, the whole point of modern networking is selecting the best options to deliver optimal performance and end-user experience when accessing data and applications, regardless of the end user’s present location. It’s about connecting people, not premises. Elements of truth However, there are caveats. This is what makes some of the messaging and claims surrounding DIA so powerful. It is up to the purchaser to evaluate how true these are for their organisation. For example, it is true that international connectivity delivered as MPLS is significantly more expensive, and in other territories service providers can charge significantly more for MPLS because of the distances they must cover. This particularly applies in the US where many NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 26of the hardware vendors are based. But does this apply to your organisation at all? Even if it does, it should not dictate an all-or-nothing approach. The most appropriate underlay solution should be selected on a per-site basis. The idea of selecting the most cost-effective connectivity per site is also a valid argument. However, where this would typically show the most benefit - and savings would probably be somewhat limited - is in organisations that are first and foremost set up to easily manage multiple suppliers, from both a procurement and a support perspective. Secondly, one would normally expect to see this in organisations that are going to supply and manage their own overlay services, so typically this would have the most significant benefit in the SME market. However, both of these aspects are typically sub- optimal/undesirable for public sector or enterprise organisations. If a larger organisation were to take this path, it could be a dangerous one. For example, two separate service providers can take the same wholesale product, from the same carrier and have them delivered to NNIs in the same data centres. The issue is that, regardless of whether it is broadband or Ethernet, each of these providers set their own traffic shaping and capacity management policies. As such, one supplier can decide that they wish to set their system up so that there is little or no contention of the NNI at any time, whereas the other can decide to cram as much as they can onto it. Usually, the good providers have policies that enable the network to be built and managed in a way that ensures customers will rarely see any adverse traffic conditions, especially in ‘business grade’ services. There tends to be much greater equity between the products of these suppliers. However, this is not going to hold true if a customer simply selects the cheapest connectivity without checking, nor will it be guaranteed in life even if it is true at the time of purchase. In summary, buyer beware. The “cheaper” model can easily turn into the “got what you paid for” model, especially in a world where bandwidth usage is expanding all the time. Traffic very rarely goes directly to The Internet unless an organisation has set itself up as a service provider and peers directly themselves. All traffic will travel through PoPs/exchanges to carriers and service providers who peer with each other. NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 27It wasn’t long ago when the only things at the edge of the network in the average home were email clients and web browsers. Now, according to Ofcom, we spend more time online in the UK than ever before: an average of three hours 37 minutes a day on smartphones, tablets and computers, and an average of one hour 21 minutes watching online services such as Netflix and BBC iPlayer. And, this number is growing! We are moving to a point where the average home has more in common with a small business in terms of connected devices (or “things”) and complexity, with an ever-growing reliance on cloud services. Edge Cloud and 5G Shape Next Gen Networks NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 28Recognising the importance of broadband connectivity and the impact it plays in our daily lives, the UK government launched Project Gigabit to help fuel the country’s efforts to build out broadband networks. The program has a lofty goal – ensuring 85% of the country is covered with gigabit-capable service by 2025. The UK’s service providers have taken the Project Gigabit ball and run with it, extending full-fibre connectivity to millions more homes and businesses. And, users are eager for even more connectivity. Research conducted by Ciena found that 43% of British adults are planning to upgrade their internet within the next 24 months, and 36% are willing to pay more for improved services. With the increased network demands of the modern home office, it's easy to understand why. The task of preparing our networks for this demand is not an easy undertaking. Networks designed 15 years ago – which represent the majority of networks we all rely on – were not built to sustain the current surge in bandwidth requirements, nor were they geared to optimise performance for modern services and network demands. Catering to support the explosion in device sales, the surge in streaming services, and the dispersion of workforces to home offices, wasn’t in early blueprints. In the past, metropolitan networks were created with assumptions around statistical multiplexing and predictable growth, largely based on population. Network operators consequently struggle with visibility into the real-time use of their assets, creating headaches in anticipating and managing surges in usage. Meanwhile, capacity, once assigned by region, is largely static, restricting the ability to reassign and optimise resources as and where required. Today, demands on the edge of the network have changed. And, while Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are suddenly seeing a huge, exponential increase in the use of their services, they also face a concurrent increase in pressure to deliver seamless services across the same networks. Next Gen Networks doing their part Next generation metro networks, to the credit of network providers, are doing their utmost to evolve with current demands. They’re set to see much greater convergence of business, mobile and residential networks, and future evolutions will consist of multilayer convergence in which IP and Ethernet are integrated over an optimised optical layer. This will reduce hardware requirements and lower costs for network providers while bringing users more reliable network services. Combined with advances in existing and new technologies – including 5G, IP and optical convergence, and network automation – next gen networks are putting CSPs in a prime position to evolve their services, but only with investment to break away from the restrictions of rigid and complex architectures. However, enhanced user expectations can only be truly met once compute and storage capabilities are moved closer to end-users, humans and machines, where content is created and consumed – at the edge. This shift will need to leverage data-driven automation and intelligence, coupled with an open architecture to adapt to demands as they arise, self-heal and provide the connectivity required for this new era. The Edge Cloud Service Provider CSPs are building out a more expansive edge cloud strategy that converts existing central office and cable headends into edge data centres. Rather than having everything in one building, resources are moved closer to the edge of the network, where content is created and consumed, to meet the expected Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of next gen applications and services. The role of the CSP does not end there, however. They also need to build open, automated and simplified networks to leverage the underlying capabilities of the network and enable seamless activities for end-users, connecting edge data centres to the underlying network with the speed, capacity, intelligence and compute capability that will enable edge users to work with the same seamless experience as they once did in the office. This starts with swapping outdated hardware with equipment that supports 400G and 800G optical transport while also placing software at the heart of infrastructure, adding telemetry points to dynamically measure network performance in real-time, using analytics and visualisation to improve network performance. This helps CSPs to truly own the edge and deliver the experiences their customers expect. And, CSPs – and the broader communications industry – must move toward an open, automated and simplified network architecture to effectively and efficiently deliver on changing end-user expectations — and capture the revenue opportunities that come with them. The holy grail is a much higher capacity, dramatically simplified, programmable and accessible infrastructure that incorporates analytics driven by hard data and intelligent automation. Jürgen Hatheier Chief Technology Officer EMEA & APAC Ciena ape NETWORKS www.networkseuropemagazine.com 29Next >