During the XVI Aotec 2023 Fair, Eduardo Perez, account manager at ZTE and Manuel Garnelo, CTO of Asteo Red Neutra, talked about how bandwidth needs are increasing and the technologies and solutions needed to be able to respond satisfactorily, i.e. with quality and minimum latency.
Eduardo Pérez: “The metaverse will be one of the biggest consumers of bandwidth”.
“Beyond the fact that we are connected through our devices, now the devices around us at home and at work also need to be connected in real time; but if we look to the future and the development of the metaverse and models such as the digital twin, the demand for bandwidth will be even greater,” explained Eduardo Perez of ZTE.
“Every four to five years we are multiplying capacity by two to four times. We are reaching a point where the growth is exponential. When you have your whole house connected, the lights, the television; everything, we will need 100 megabytes, 200 megabytes, 700 megabytes, more than a gigabyte at home. This is true at the household level, but it is the same in companies. They have more and more information, they need to have it instantly and make decisions at the moment”.
According to Perez the metaverse is going to be one of the biggest consumers of bandwidth. “We are in a startup moment. It’s like when the first social applications started and nobody used them. Today most have at least two or three. Companies are making a lot of investments so that there will be more and more applications and this metaverse will be a reality.”
Fiber optics as a response
Regarding this great demand for bandwidth and other high-capacity solutions such as 5G or low orbit satellites, Eduardo explained that they are all complementary, although fiber is what has allowed us “to have a communications network like the one we have and is what has facilitated the existence of data centers and the cloud“.
According to Perez, from ZTE, satellites have improved latency, but when demand is high and several users coincide, it can be saturated. So far, it has not been possible to saturate fiber, in addition to being a more stable infrastructure.
Regarding latency and the devices that need it, Eduardo emphasized that the difference lies more in the application or use it has. For example: If a water management system needs to be activated, “it does not make sense for the information from these sensors – the data – to travel very far, because, depending on certain decisions, I may have to activate other systems. Or in the case of matters related to civil protection, that information has to be in milliseconds, because a person’s life could be at stake because of that speed.
Pérez added that if the investment in fiber is not made, “no one will be able to put in place an infrastructure so that this information remains local. Fiber enables edge computing and that this data remains local, because it makes no sense for it to be in a centralized datacenter in a public way, because it will be consumed locally”.
Fiber and Wifi 7
Manuel Garnelo reflected with Eduardo Perez on the importance of having a quality wifi router as a complement to a solution such as fiber optics that enables high bandwidths. In this regard, Perez spoke about the case of ZTE and the advances in relation to wifi 7 that “will allow a home to have connections of more than 40 gigabytes. It will improve coverage. We will provide a new spectrum, a new signal that is less congested. WiFi 7 will be certified and will start to be marketed next year.
