Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Global WAN Business has Bifurcated

The global capacity business has bifurcated. Hyperscale data center operators, media and content providers have one set of needs while enterprises have different sets of needs. 


Hyperscalers need to connect with other data centers (including cable landing sites, internet points of presence, owned and third party data centers). The hyperscaler requirements are almost exclusively internet data volumes, and video entertainment represents the bulk of that demand. 

source: Cisco 


Enterprises not in the content business, on the other hand, need to connect headquarters locations with branch offices and workers with cloud or premises-based applications. 


source: Aryaka 


Hyperscalers require optical transmission and IP bandwidth. 


Non-content enterprises need quality of service networking (MPLS) and virtual network support (SD-WAN and VPNs), plus voice services. 


Much of the hyperscaler need is met by owned facilities. Nearly all the non-content enterprise demand is met by retail services. Very little hyperscaler bandwidth demand is access network related (connections to end users), while almost all non-content enterprises require access network connectivity.


Hyperscalers require relatively less collaboration support (in terms of bandwidth volume or spending). Enterprises always need significant amounts of unified communications support.


So MPLS and SD-WAN are important non-content enterprise concerns and purchases. That is virtually never true for hyperscalers and content enterprises (in terms of bandwidth demand and spending).


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