#103: A Network for the Future

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2016

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine a broadband network that's smart. It teaches itself. It repairs itself. And maybe, it's even self-aware. No, we're not talking about Skynet, but software-defined networking (SDN) has the potential to completely transform our Internet infrastructure. Since the birth of the commercial Internet, network upgrades, modifications, and repairs almost always involved on-the-ground engineers and technicians making changes. But companies are already working on virtualizing those functions. Soon enough, it may all be in the cloud. A transformation like this is hardly simple, so who would make such a massive investment? Who would take such a gamble? Evan is joined by Mazin Gilbert, Assistant Vice President of Intelligent Services Research at AT&T Labs. They discuss how AT&T is approaching SDN and what it means for customers, businesses, and the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.
0:11.4	I'm Evan Schwarger, your host.
0:13.2	On today's show, following up on a topic we've discussed before, software defined networking,
0:19.2	building the internet of the future and building an internet
0:22.5	that is smart, that is self-healing, that learns. And we talked about this on a previous
0:27.8	episode, Software-defined networking 101. I encourage you to go back and listen to that for a primer.
0:33.3	But today we're going to dig deeper and talk about how software-defined networking goes with big data and how the two could be complementary in the same way that peanut butter and jelly are.
0:43.6	So joining me to discuss this is Mazin Gilbert, Assistant Vice President of Intelligence Systems and Platform Research at AT&T Labs.
0:51.7	Mazin, thanks for joining the show.
0:53.6	It's my pleasure. Thank you, Evan, for inviting me.
0:56.6	So, Mazen, before we get into the big data aspect, I know you've had to describe complex topics in
1:02.4	layman's terms before. So just give listeners a recap of what software-defined networking is and how
1:08.4	best they can, you know, relate to it in the real world?
1:13.1	Software defined network is really a network transformation initiative that we at AT&T have been
1:21.5	in that journey for the past two, three years. If you take a step back, Evan, and you think about the volume of
1:29.9	traffic that has been on our network for the past seven, eight years, that volume of traffic has
1:35.8	grown by 150,000 percent. And looking ahead till 2020, we expect our traffic to increase by a factor of at least 10, from what we are seeing
1:46.2	it today. We're no longer in the old world where it's the voice world, where we could anticipate
1:53.7	and predict traffic month by month. The traffic is growing exponentially. So moving to a software
2:00.6	defined network allows us to increase capacity, allow us to manage the scale
2:07.5	and the growth of this traffic in that exponential form.
2:11.8	In an essence, what software-defined network is is basically separating our network into a commodity hardware
	...

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