Silicon leap serves emerging markets
● A breakthrough in the silicon technology that makes up networking will have a dramatic impact on emerging markets in the coming decade.
Cisco Silicon One, unveiled at a press conference in San Francisco this week, is a programmable networking chip, meaning it can carry coded instructions for automating network activity.
The first generation of the chip, the Q100, for the first time breaks through the 10-terabit-per-second speed barrier in transmitting information on a network. Cisco also unveiled the Cisco 8000 Series, the first routers using the new technology.
Cisco dominates the market in the switches and routers that connect the components of the internet, with a more than 50% global market share. It says the new technology delivers twice the bandwidth and three times the performance of the current leading-edge products, while requiring half the power.
Company CEO and chair Chuck Robbins said Cisco has been working on the technology since 2014.
“We are really trying to create the backbone, the foundation, of technology that is going to power the future applications of the internet,” he told the media on Wednesday. “Traffic is doubling every 100 days, 49-billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2023, with 4.8-billion users, and the average person will have 3.6 internet-connected devices on their bodies or with them. This is all creating this incredible capacity issue on the internet.
“The traffic that is going to be generated in 2022 will be equal to the aggregate traffic that has been generated to date. That’s the magnitude for what we’re solving,” he said.
“We all have to do a better job; we all have to make it simpler and easier and give our customers the ability to move with greater speed, in a simpler way, with agility.”
The biggest beneficiaries of the new technology, initially, will be mobile operators who face the challenge of scaling up their infrastructure to meet growing demand.
Rakesh Chopra, the Cisco engineer tasked in 2014 with conceptualising the next generation of Cisco products, told Business Times in an exclusive interview that the technology would fundamentally change the paradigm for mobile network operators across Africa, in terms of the cost of infrastructure deployment, management and power use.
“What if, for that same amount of money they are spending now, they can go from deploying a 100-megabit-per-second router to 10 terabits per second? All of a sudden, all the bandwidth in the world is available. That enables fundamental shifts in the industry. It’ll be fascinating to see how everybody makes use of the underlying technology that we’re enabling,” said Chopra.
He said the cost efficiencies of the new technology made it ideal for deployment in a bandwidth-hungry environment like SA.
“A few years ago, if you wanted highbandwidth routing, you needed to deploy a 42-rack modular routing system, which would consume 10kW of power and be limited to a massive service provider’s central offices.
“As you moved out from their central offices, you got slower and slower routing infrastructure, and lower and lower power infrastructure because, frankly, you can’t put 10kW in a small, remote area.
“Now, with Cisco 8000 and Cisco Silicon One you’ve put that in one pizza box, using less than 500W of power. It means that you can deploy high routing bandwidth anywhere in the world.”
Ian Redpath, principal analyst at the Intelligent Networks practice of consulting firm Ovum, said the technology would allow emerging operators to leapfrog legacy technologies.
“One of the beauties of some of the more emerging markets is the opportunity to deploy the latest technology in a greenfields context. Because they’re not dealing with legacy product they can just jump to the best of breed. We will see people deploy this type of technology from day one, and potentially get a big leap in technology.”
Ironically, he said, it will be a more complex proposition for incumbents, from an operational point of view.
“If you have an existing operational network, you’re never going to set that aside. You have to think in terms of migration path. Whereas when you have an opportunity for greenfields deployment, you just use the state of the art and put it down and go.”
Redpath pointed out that the unveiling of the technology would merely have been good marketing had it not been for the presence of a stellar line-up of partners who took part in a panel discussion during the event.
“They brought an all-star line-up of service providers and cloud providers that was unparalleled,” he said. “Comcast, AT&T, Google, Facebook, Disney and Microsoft. They were at the table, and they wouldn’t come to the table if they weren’t aligned with the Cisco vision and proposition.”
David Goeckeler, executive vice-president and GM of networking and security at Cisco, said the power of the new product set lies in the fact that it eliminates the need for different chip sets for different purposes on the network.
“We believe it’s breakthrough technology,” he said. “This whole idea that we can consolidate more of the network on a single platform just eliminates an enormous amount of complexity. That applies the same around the world, to anybody that’s building a network, and anybody that’s accessing the internet.”