Content Consumption Now Shapes Computing

Where it comes to content, some “90 percent of the world consumes while only 10 percent creates,” according to Girish Mathrubootham Freshdesk CEO.

Many of the most-important trends in devices, applications, computing architecture and networking flow directly from that one main trend.

Despite the new trend of symmetrical Internet access connections, in perhaps 90 percent of cases, especially as bandwidth climbs towards the gigabit range, asymmetrical connections still work for most consumers, and even most organization locations.

Full-motion video is an example of one key app that does shape demand for faster uplinks, even if most of the bandwidth still is needed for downlink traffic.

The access network design economics might still, for quite some time, suggest that an asymmetrical bandwidth design, which often costs less, remains a suitable approach. As the cost of symmetrical connections drops, that will could change, however.

Since most users consume content, most of the time, rather than create it, mobile and portable devices are viable end user devices. Even the content that most people do create (messages or pictures) can be created easily on a mobile or portable device (tablet).

The other big architectural change is that most content people want to consume now resides in the cloud. So cloud computing is becoming the dominant computing architecture.

Cloud computing in turn shapes demand for global network capacity and performance, while creating a new role for mobile and untethered networks.

If the desktop PC was the signature appliance of the personal computing era, then the mobile phone is the signature appliance of the cloud era.

If computing is cloud based, then apps also must be cloud based. Cloud-based apps, in turn, are more consumable by users of mobile devices; easier to deliver and update.

But all the trends flow from the volume of tasks now required of modern computing. Where PCs might once have been used to create documents and reports by relatively few people, computing now undergirds content distribution and consumption, gaming, messaging and communications.

That is a profoundly asymmetrical process requiring large amounts of local bandwidth with more stringent latency, congestion and intruder protection requirements, in a growing number of cases.

Pervasiveness has been a trend within computing for some time, but will accelerate again as computing and messaging used by machines and embedded sensors becomes the next wave of growth for many industries related to computing and communications.