We are the on the verge of the next great stage of technological evolution. The trickle of different trends clearly point to what I would like to term as C-cubed (C3) representing the merger of computing technologies, communication advances and the cloud.
There are no surprises in this assessment. Clearly it does not fall into the category of Chaos theories’ “butterfly effect” where a seemingly unrelated cause has a far-reaching effect, typically the fluttering of a butterfly in Puerto Rico is enough to cause an earthquake in China.
The C-cubed future that seems very probable is based on the advances in mobile broadband, advances in communication and the emergence of cloud computing. A couple of years back Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems believed that the “network is the computer”. Now with the introduction of Google’s Chrome book this trend will soon catch on. In fact I can easily visualize a ubiquitous device which I would like to call as the “cloudbook”.
The cloudbook would be a device that would resemble a tablet like the iPad, Playbook etc but would carry little or no hard disk. Local storage will be through USB devices or SD-Cards which these days come with large storage in the range of 80GB and above. The Cloud book would have no operating system. It would simply have a bootstrap program which will allow the user to choose from several different Operating Systems (OS) namely Window’s, Linux, Solaris and Mac etc which will execute on the cloud. All applications will be executed directly on the cloud. The user will also store all his programs and data on the cloud. Some amount of offline storage will be possible in portable storage devices like the memory stick, SD card etc.
The cloudbook will be a ubiquitous device. It will access the internet through mobile broadband. The access could be through a GPRS, WCDMA or a LTE connection. With the blazing speeds of 56 Mbps promised by LTE the ability to access the public cloud for executing programs and for storing of data is extremely feasible. Access should be almost instantaneous. Using the mobile broadband for access and the cloud for computing and storage will be the trend in the future.
Besides its use for computing, the cloudbook will also be used for making voice or video calls. This is the promise of IP Multimedia Systems (IMS) technology. IMS is a technology that has been in the wings for quite some time. IMS technology envisages an all-IP Core Network that will be used for transporting voice, data and video. As the speeds of the IP pipes become faster and the algorithms to iron out QOS issues are worked out the complete magnificence of the vision of IMS will become a reality and high speed video applications will become common place.
The cloudbook will use the WCDMA, 3G, network to make voice and video calls to others. The 3G RNC or the 4G eNodeB’s will enable the transmission and reception of voice, data or video to and from the Core Network. LTE networks will either user Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) or VOLTE (Voice over LTE) to transfer voice and video over either the 3G network or over the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). In the future high speed video based calls and applications will be extremely prevalent and a device like the cloudbook will increase the user experience manifold.
Besides IMS also envisions Applications Server (AS) spread across the network providing other services like Video-on-Demand, Real-time multi player gaming. It is clear that these AS may actually be instances sitting off the public cloud.
Hence the future clearly points to a marriage of computing, communication and the cloud where each will have a symbiotic relationship with the other resulting in each other. The network can be visualized as one large ambient network of IMS Call Session Control Function Servers (CSCFs) , Virtualized Servers on the Cloud and Application servers (AS).
Mobile broadband will become commonplace and all computing and communication will be through 3G or 4G networks.
The future is almost here and the future is C-cubed (C3)!!!
Published in Telecom Asia, Jul 8 2011 – The Future is C-cubed
Giga thoughts ... 