Fiona Nolan was appointed Senior Vice President of Marketing at CommScope, in 2012. With more than 25 years of experience in the IT and telecommunication markets, she has held regional and segment level marketing positions for CommScope. Fiona has a proven track record in facilitating organizational change as well as leading marketing and brand strategy development. As a forward-thinking, collaborative marketing professional, a key focus for Fiona is aligning organizational structure and go-to-market strategies that drive sustainable competitive advantage and market growth.
DIGITAL MAGAZINE
Think Fiber Think CommScope
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Everyone communicates. It’s the essence of the human experience. How we communicate is continually evolving. Technology is reshaping the way we live, learn and thrive. The epicenter of this transformation is the network—our passion. CommScope engineers are rethinking the purpose, role and usage of networks to help our customers increase bandwidth, expand capacity, enhance efficiency, speed deployment and simplify migration. From remote cell sites to massive sports arenas, from busy airports to state-of-the-art data centers—we provide the essential expertise and vital infrastructure your business needs to succeed.
Today, we are innovating faster to deliver smarter technologies, solutions and insights that give your network a true competitive edge. I am delighted to introduce the inaugural edition of the CommScope Magazine, a digital publication that is content rich with information valued by early-adopters, tech journalists and network engineering enthusiasts. I hope you will enjoy the CommScope Magazine as we provide a first-hand glimpse at the trends, techniques and technologies driving our industry.
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Issue 1
John Schmidt leads CommScope’s Global Data Center Solutions. He has over 20 years of experience including Design Engineering, Product Management, Business Development, and Sales Leadership. John has acquired over18 patents and has participated on several standards committees. John has a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering and a MS in Management Science and Engineering.
Key trends in the data center
The data center, as we have come to know it, has changed. With bandwidth needs driven by trends such as wearable technology and big data, we see a shift in how organizations are viewing, building and planning their data centers. We see many organizations migrate new data centers to leased Multi-Tenant Data Center (MTDC) facilities and public cloud. When organizations choose to build their own data center, the facilities need to be more efficient and achieve higher density. With changes taking place in how technologies are used and valued within the enterprise, there are many shifts I believe will happen in the near future. Read on for a summary of the key trends influencing data centers in 2016.
Shift from storage to compute and on-demand access
The previous generations of data centers focused primarily on storage of information and disaster recovery. Geographic diversity was required for backup and data was retrieved on a periodic basis. Now the focus has shifted to analyzing and processing data for on-demand access. The rise of mobility and wearable technology creates requirements for latency that previously has never been seen. Consumers and business users alike have an expectation of on-demand access to data from the cloud with the same user experience when accessing data residing on the device. This results in data centers that are far more distributed. The most efficient way for most business to do this is with cloud computing.
Where the growth is happening
As stated earlier, data centers will need to be more efficient and achieve higher density. From a service provider and MTDC perspective, there will be a large growth in providing distributed computing. The large wave of growth will be in point-of-presence (PoP) data centers, supporting content delivery networks for service providers as well as promoting network virtualization and software defined networks. A combination of growth within PoP and MTDC will increase the need for interconnecting or peering between service providers.
Bringing computing power to the edge
A big expansion in the coming year will be the idea of moving computing power to the edge of the network. We are seeing service providers want to push as much computing resources to the edge of the network as possible to reduce latency by reducing the number of “hops” the data has to take in order to reach the end user. A large amount of data is shifting from storage to algorithms that manipulate and analyze the data stored. As we use the data, we need to reduce latency. Ten years ago, in the era of programs, you would pull a program up on our laptops that took some time to load and we would look at it for long periods of time a couple of times a day. Now, we shifted towards an app-driven world where we look at the data hundreds of times a day in shorter durations. Users are starting to feel that data should be predictive and instantly serve up information from the cloud. To give you an example, look at how social networks launched in the early 2000s. One factor that limited growth during the first few years was the need to increase the number of servers available. Today, a new social network can have instant access to nearly unlimited compute resources on every continent with the use of cloud services. This provides instant scalability, especially for start-ups and tech companies. So naturally, small and medium-sized businesses are going that way.
As you build out these data centers, it becomes a game of how efficient you can make these facilities. You can’t afford to have an inefficient data center. You need to know exactly where everything is, how it is being used and powered. Any form of inefficiency in the data center can be costly and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) will be paramount in helping keep these data centers running smoothly.
How DCIM and ITSM play in the mix
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The streaming, uninterruptable, low latency services of music, video, and information is spurring the growth of hyperscale. Users want steaming information without delay. More people are moving their computer services to the edge of the network. Data can exist in multiple places to provide static information without latency.
This past year was the year when we heard the trumpeting of wearable technology as we watched a few major technology companies take great strides toward moving away from managing their own data centers and completely into the cloud. It’s exciting to see how the data center will grow and change over the next few years, starting in 2016. I foresee more businesses expanding via cloud and co-location, while a simultaneous expansion of computing power expands throughout the network and around the world.
The scale of demand stemming from the number of consumers doing online shopping caused several high profile outages. These events will drive organizations to move some of their operations to the cloud in hyperscale data centers. This will give them the ability to flex into a cloud capability when their network becomes stressed. Some phenomena happening within the hyperscale arena include:
The hype around hyperscale
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World-class events place your network in the spotlight. When that game-changing moment occurs, CommScope solutions will ensure your network is up to the task. Choose CommScope for network speed, flexibility, agility and performance.
Elise Vadnais works as a market intelligence analyst in the chief technology officer’s group at CommScope. A Millennial herself, Elise analyzes the significant implications of Millennial technological trends and constantly connected mindsets on broadband networks. Elise has three years of experience in the industry, researching broadband network infrastructures across the Americas and Europe. She has also studied consumer trends, observing them through industry forums and life as a connected Millennial. She owns multiple devices, rents a flat with her roommates, travels the world and always stays socially connected via her favorite technology.
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Three out of four Millennials (74%) agreed that they could not survive one full day without their smartphone, compared to just half (51%) of Baby Boomers.
Two-thirds (67%) of Millennials agreed or strongly agreed that social media is their major form of social communication, compared withonly one-third (35%) of Baby Boomers.
Millennials spend more than 2.5 times as many hours per day (1.6) receiving social media messages (snaps, links, videos, pictures, etc.) than Baby Boomers (.6).
Half of Millennials (51%) said they would like their online purchases to be delivered within an hour, wherever they are, compared just a third of Baby Boomers (34%).
One quarter of Millennials (25%) strongly agree that they prefer the latest tech device, compared to 1 in 9 (11%) Baby Boomers.
Baby Boomers could not go without:
Millennials could not go without:
Millennials spend more than twice as many hours per day (2.0) on video streaming platforms than Baby Boomers (0.8).
Sao Paulo
Hong Kong
San Francisco
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Millennials are willing to spend 28 percent more per month on average than Boomers to ensure unlimited high-speed internet connectivity.
Baby Boomers
Millennials
Disposable income: how much will Millennials pay?
Whether they consume on stunning 4k TVs or small, hand-held devices, the million-dollar question remains: how much of their disposable income are Millennials willing to invest in fast, convenient, reliable connectivity? Compared with Baby Boomers, our survey found surprisingly strong evidence of a markedly greater willingness on the part of Millennials to invest more in their internet service experience—provided it is far more personalized, flexible and scalable than any current offerings.
Millennials cannot spearhead the future without networks
Network providers are hard at work now designing platforms that will help Millennials make some of the greatest breakthroughs in human history. To achieve this goal, a better understanding of the Millennial lifestyle, spending habits, connectivity expectations and technology priorities will drive major evolution in the physical layer.
Along with corroborating research, our survey results appear to support the interpretation that Millennials take a much more commoditized view of connectivity, focusing on quality of service over brand loyalty or the company/customer relationship. They may also gravitate toward whichever provider offers the strongest combination of services, flexibility, speed and reliability. This could result in shrinking buyer loyalty, making it more difficult for poorly-performing providers to remain competitive, driving more mergers and encouraging greater market cooperation and partnership.
Millennials, consumers younger than 35, are rapidly emerging as the primary target demographic for technology companies and the broadband network operators who support them. As a global network infrastructure solutions provider, CommScope was curious: How do Millennials view and use technology? What are their connectivity expectations? Are these differences dramatically different than the generations preceding them? How will this generation impact network design, deployment and monetization? To help you prepare for this future, CommScope recently surveyed more than 4,000 Baby Boomers (ages 51-70) and Millennials (ages 15- 35) in four major cities: San Francisco, London, Hong Kong and Sau Paulo. The results are telling:
Driving network evolution
Fast, easy deployment with flexibility to scale quickly and cost-effectively
High performance solutions fulfilling the need for high bandwidth, whilst also saving time and space for setup
A fiber infrastructure that allows simple migration from 10G to 40G or 100G is essential
Wherever your network is headed, it’s getting there with fiber connectivity. Nothing else offers the speed and agility your growing network demands—and no one but CommScope delivers the innovative fiber connectivity solutions you need to power the high-speed, high-bandwidth networks of tomorrow. For any network, any place, CommScope can help you architect, grow and evolve your fiber network to meet your business goals with speed and simplicity.
Bypass the problem with CommScope.
You know the tools. What about the talent?
CommScope saw this challenge and built a solution that gets you around it by eliminating the need for much of that specialized labor. It’s a plug-and-play, no-splice FTTH solution that makes fiber infrastructure a breeze to install with less-specialized, more widely-available—quickly, efficiently and reliably.
It’s an easy decision, but can be a difficult strategy. The main bottleneck? Finding the specialized labor generally needed for large-scale FTTH deployments. For these larger roll-outs, trained expertise is hard to find and expensive to hire—that slows down deployments and jeopardizes market share.
Customers are using your broadband network differently, so you have to plan and build it differently. You have to deliver binge-streaming TV, fast-twitch online gaming, and thousands of hours of uploaded vacation videos. You also have to support more and more connected devices—AND more kinds of devices. They expect you to be all things to all people, and somehow, that’s exactly what you have to be. Meeting this new broadband demand starts with deploying fiber to the home (FTTH), a big enough pipe to channel all that content.
So you need fiber
They need bandwidth
“The cabling at Daytona was old and outdated, installed piecemeal over a period of many years,” said CommScope technical manager Vince Sumrall. “DAYTONA Rising provided an opportunity to start over with a clean slate - and CommScope was able to deliver a comprehensive solution that ensures that all of the new communications components work together as a seamless network.”
12,500 terminations to create a comprehensive connectivity solution throughout the Daytona complex.
Rising
When the green flag dropped at the January 2016 running of the Rolex® 24 at Daytona, it marked the start of another exciting race at the Daytona International Speedway—and the beginning of a new era at the legendary track. DAYTONA Rising, the end-to-end, top-to-bottom transformation of the world-renowned motorsports facility, leveraged CommScope connectivity solutions to support the advanced technology that delivers the ultimate race-day experience to fans.
A new Daytona International Speedway rises—with state-of-the-art communications technology powered by CommScope
“ The DAYTONA Rising project represents a significant step forward for the technology capabilities at a racetrack. Thanks to partners like CommScope, Daytona International Speedway will provide fans and partners alike access to some of the most advanced technology platforms available today.” — Craig Neeb, executive vice president, chief development and digital officer, International Speedway Corporation
In addition to the immediate services CommScope’s connectivity solutions are already supporting at Daytona International Speedway, the infrastructure will also enable the speedway to expand its communications capabilities as consumer demands change and technology changes to meet them. CommScope’s network infrastructure provides a future-ready system that will enable new services such as Ultra HD support and Wi-Fi throughout the property in the years to come, without requiring any cabling upgrades. “Early on, the key challenge for the design of the technology platform for DAYTONA Rising was looking beyond where we are today,” Neeb said. “We’re talking about an infrastructure plant that has to last 20 years beyond the opening, and we want to make sure that what we implement will be able to support things that we don’t know exist today or tomorrow.”
For DAYTONA Rising, CommScope supplied fiber and copper cabling equivalent to more than 140 laps of Daytona’s famed tri-oval track, including:
250 miles of SYSTIMAX® Category 6 structured cable, offering performance that exceeds Category 6 performance standards by up to 300 percent, with a cost-effective design and robust reliability that can help make network downtime a thing of the past. 100 miles of TeraSPEED® singlemode fiber-optic cable, designed to operate from 1280 nanometers to 1625 nanometers to increase the useable wavelength range over conventional singlemode fiber by more than 50 percent and future-proof the network for next-generation equipment.
Miles and miles of CommScope cable pull it all together
Future-ready connectivity, ready today for tomorrow’s technology
The new Daytona’s networks run on CommScope
The redeveloped Daytona International Speedway needed to be equipped with the network bandwidth and flexibility to offer services that would both enhance the fans’ experience and improve track operations. CommScope deployed a comprehensive cabling infrastructure solution that connects and supports virtually every communication and facility management function in the stadium.
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Backed by CommScope's 20-year product and application warranty and 3-year warranty for active components of the imVision system
Increase operational efficiency, uptime and productivity
Simplify audits and compliance
Enhance change management
Locate devices - and problems - on your network
Ensure tighter security throughout your network
Real-time visibility into the connectivity driving your business
imVision® is a sophisticated approach to infrastructure management. It combines intelligent hardware and software to provide users with unprecedented visibility and control over their network connectivity.