Video: Will the Demands of 4K and VR Push Us From Deep Cloud Apps to Edge Cloud Apps?
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Mark Fisher: There's another way to this that hopefully will then bring it home to you as well. We've lived through Gen-Y delivery, when things like Blockbuster were real. It seems incredibly long ago that anyone here would have ever gone to a Blockbuster, but it happened. And I'm sure most of you are guilty.
We then moved to what I’ll call the Deep Cloud to draw this distinction. In the Deep Cloud phase, we stream for Netflix, and we all depend on Deep Cloud services on a scale that's really almost impossible to comprehend. What Amazon web has done, what Google has done, what Microsoft is doing.
But we think there's room for an extension of this journey, that takes us to the edge, and there's reasons for it. There are applications, which we're going to see in just a moment, that depend on the scale, the bandwidth, the capacity, and the low latency to come to life. We believe this. We're not alone in this view. But this creates a role for service providers and it creates implications for the content delivery networks.
So what are the requirements for these apps? Bandwidth, as I mentioned already. We’ve got two broad boxes we need to check to make these apps work. One is capacity, bandwidth, which is what everyone in the room here is about; the other one is latency, which you care about deeply as well. But look at this progression. This came out of Cisco VNI, but it was also used by Hong Kong Telecom recently, because they announced a gigabit service to the home.
You can even discount these numbers by half, if you like, or even more, it doesn't matter. If you think that there's room in our world, a day in your life, or your kids, for these kinds of things: 360 degree video, AR, VR, and so on, even just simply 4K streaming, they will drive extraordinary needs for capacity. And that's not solving this problem alone. It’s not sufficient.
What we need to do then, is look beyond it, and look at what we call, now, what we're calling in Qwilt, the 20 millisecond zone. You may have seen our ad in the program. Let's call it the Red Zone for a minute. This is work done by what is now Nokia Bell Labs, what was ATT Bell Labs, that says, "Look, for these apps--VR, Cloud Assistant, Drive, AR, 4K video, other kinds of high resin, or active applications, they need a latency." They need latency performance inside the 20-millisecond zone.
You've got to be within let's say less than 10 milliseconds to the user, if you're going to have any hope of seeing these apps materialize. So, we have now, if you will, set the stage that says that this demand for these applications is coming. They need two things: substantial capacity, and they need low latency, extremely low latency, humbling latency in terms of how low it is.
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