What will the future IT infrastructure look like for providing users and edge devices with various IP-based services?
Experts agree that the future will predominantly consist of data networks via air interfaces, i.e., radio-based solutions. Services in the so-called access layer must be largely accessible via mobile means—public transport, autonomous driving, or other services where access is required exactly where people and digital machines and devices need it.
Existing street lighting infrastructure is an obvious choice for implementing these diverse radio technologies, as street lighting infrastructure...
To put these street-level networks through their paces, we have set up this network infrastructure in a real-world laboratory in Lünen, Westphalia, along an approximately 800-meter-long commercial street, where we are testing an increasing number of radio-based technologies as well as a wide variety of services, including neutral host concepts.
In this process, access layers—i.e., network connections for edge devices such as notebooks, sensors, robots, autonomously moving units (vehicles, drones, etc.), and anything that speaks IP—are connected to fail-safe backbones to reach a wide variety of application layers (data centers, clouds, etc.). Free and paid services are combined in the process,
as well as a wide variety of wireless technologies.
Our tests show that these street-level networks—which we call City Area Networks—can be installed extremely quickly and provide an astonishingly cost-effective contribution to broadband access.
In large cities, there is often a lack of excavation permits required to carry out the umpteenth network expansion for fiber optics due to insufficient network capacity.
Using Terragraph technology developed by Facebook and Intel, 60 GHz point-to-point radio technology at street level offers a very fast deployment and expansion option, as well as rapid setup of a backbone or even a backhaul for micro sites in 5G expansion.
New to the program: Broadband expansion, internet services, and cloud services
