In the very beginning of Telecommunications, around 1880, the
business seemed to be the sale of telephones: it should have been up to the
buyer of the telephone to roll out the needed wires to connect with another
telephone. But, soon it was realized that the “connectivity fabric” was the
most important, and expensive part of the story. So the Network Providers started
making the huge (Capex) investments for exploiting (and managing) such network
infrastructures.
Telecommunication business didn’t change that much in the
following 130 years.
But it will change radically in the coming few years, due to the
convergence of a number of (well-known) techno-economic trajectories.
Example: already today main of the overall Telecommunication business
is in the smart-phones, not in the network. The number of smart-phone being
sold versus network equipment is billions against millions, with economic
unbalance 70% vs 30% in favor of the terminals. This means the market is
already led by smart-phones, and perhaps tomorrow by future smart terminals,
such as robots, drones, any sort of autonomous machines equipped with
processing, storage, communications capabilities and sensors/actuators. This
does not mean that the network is no longer important, obviously: it means that
it will change radically and also our perception of it. It’s the Softwarization
of Telecommunications, which I started predicting that five years ago, and that
now it’s really coming into reality.
Softwarization
will tranform the Telecommunications infrastructures from today networks of
interconnected closed boxes (todays nodes, e.g., switches, routers,
middle-boxes, etc) into a continuum of logical containers (e.g., Virtual
Machines, or Dockers) executing millions of software processes, interacting
each other. If it will make sense to allocate, move or change a functionality
in a smart-terminal, in an edge DC, even a SME, a User or a machine will be
able making it. Not only humans but also autonomous software entities will be
able to produce and consume services in this continuum of ICT virtual
resources.
That’s
a radically different perspective for Telecommunications and ICT.
At
this level, it makes a lot of sense to investigate how modeling, control and
steering the dynamics of this software continuum. The mathematics behind this,
in fact, may open the way to new models for a networked cognition, or even a
new theory of information beyond Shannon. It will be about understanding how
and why human or software processes beings assemble themselves into social
networks. Just imagine dynamic logical networks where every logical node is a person
or an avatar and every logical link between logical nodes is a relationship
between them.
It’s about mathematical, social, biological and psychological
rules that govern how these logical networks are assembled, are operated, how
they will affect our lives, and the economy. That's the mine where extracting the value.