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Website Maintenance Announcement – September 19–21
Activities begin at 6:00 PM CT on Friday, September 19 and continue through Sunday, September 21.
During this time, Product and My Product List functionality will be unavailable
The rapid evolution of technology available to enterprises will take many different forms--and require some different strategies to fully leverage these capabilities.
Successful enterprises are those that never stop adapting to the changing terrain of business. Like the veteran team captain who reads the field, identifying opportunities and weighing risks, enterprises that flourish are those who take the initiative. In sport as well as business, staying rooted and passive can get you run over while you wait for the best path forward to present itself. 2024 may well prove to be the year that will quickly sort out the hall-of-famers from the benchwarmers as a number of important enterprise technology developments take the field.
There are three big things landing this year, and each comes with its own risks, benefits and solutions. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it includes technologies that will impact most enterprises in some way in 2024—and may already be in the mix for some.
Wi-Fi 7 adds multi-link operation (MLO) that enables access points (APs) to simultaneously drive multiple bands and channels at the same time, so the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz streams are all available concurrently, from the same AP, which sends capacity skyrocketing and drives latency way down. Even more, MLO delivers a more reliable connection between an endpoint and the Wi-Fi® AP. Thus, 2024 is going to be the year when enterprises will take a deeper look at their use cases and realize that what was once thought untenable via Wi-Fi has finally become possible.
Moreover, the 6.0 GHz band is also shared by unlicensed cellular network applications. This opens the door to some exciting applications in converged networking, as you’ll see next.
For enterprises looking for the most agility in how people and devices are connected, 2024 will bring important advances in how multiple networks and protocols can be driven in parallel, optimizing the connectivity mix to suit specific enterprise needs with purpose-built networks.
That’s the good news for enterprises in 2024. These technologies are going to set the stage for evolution for the next decade or two, and they’re all hitting the mainstream at about the same time. Of course, this kind of growth comes with growing pains, and they too fall into three main challenges that span these technologies.
Each of these interrelated challenges is a steep hill to climb, but not an unscalable one. Even as these challenges start being felt, enterprises have innovative solutions close at hand. Those that take advantage will be best positioned to leverage the benefits of new network technologies in the years ahead—and to minimize the potential downsides. Here are three key resources available to enterprises that are eager to embrace these advances with confidence.
Illustrations of the computation power available to train AI systems (data provided by OpenAI) and the corresponding costs over time (data provided by ARK Invest)
AI-powered network management has become powerful enough to keep converged enterprise networks operating smoothly, with less IT involvement and a leaner budget—and the upfront costs in training a purpose-built GPT-3 AI model is forecasted by ARK Invest to plummet to .0065% of the investment required just a few years ago. AI can help ensure SLA compliance even as enterprises build more converged, flexible and powerful networks, removing much of the risk from adoption.
These benefits were only available before in a fragmented and unreliable ecosystem of heterogenous vendor security hardware and software. Matter- and Thread-certified devices will finally remove the challenges and risks that had stalled greater IoT adoption.
Lastly, for those enterprises limited by IT resources and time more so than the money required to design, build, manage, and support converged networks, there are vendors who offer a complete set of “managed services” to choose from to meet their network needs.
One thing all three of these solutions have in common is that they are focused on relieving the enterprise of the complexity associated with the most advanced converged networks. AI delivers the most sought-after benefit—that of network assurance that goes beyond mundane monitoring and enables a lean IT team to tackle higher-value projects instead. Likewise, the well-defined connectivity framework provided by the Matter and Thread protocols built to support interoperability, security and simplicity, plays a pivotal role in accelerating the proliferation of IoT applications in many industry verticals. Lastly, the NaaS model can reduce the entire experience to a simple, turnkey relationship between enterprise and network.
The key developments taking place in 2024 will resonate far beyond this coming year. The arrival of so many exciting technologies to the mainstream could well set the tempo for decades to come. For those enterprises willing to embrace them—with the smartest combination of AI, IoT and NaaS support—2024 will indeed be the start of something very, very big.
© 2024 CommScope, Inc. All rights reserved. CommScope and the CommScope logo are registered trademarks of CommScope and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. For additional trademark information see https://www.commscope.com/trademarks. Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 are trademarks of the Wi-Fi Alliance. Zigbee and Matter are trademarks of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Bluetooth is a trademark of Bluetooth SIG, Inc. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.
This article was first published in RCR Wireless.