What the new year will bring for telecom regulators and IoT insecurity
Procera Networks is a networking equipment company with first-hand experience in the impact of network services and regulatory decisions on delivery and Quality of Service.
With this in mind, Cam Cullen, VP of Global Marketing at Procera has made a number of predictions for the industry in 2017.
For the new year, Cullen believes that telecom regulators will start to focus more on network quality.
"Both the FCC in the US and BEREC in Europe have issued guidance that asks telecom operators to detail the actual QoE delivered to subscribers on their networks – including throughput, latency, and packet loss for all service plans," he explains.
"Consumers are becoming more sophisticated in how they use broadband and more sensitive to network disruption as a result, especially if it leads to slow social networking, stuttering video streaming, or laggy gaming.
While regulators go a step further and get pulled into mandating quality measurements for operators, Cullen also predicts that IoT security issues will continue to steal headlines.
"In 2017, the well-publicised issues with security on IoT devices will cause more problems on broadband networks. The Dyn attack that was primarily powered by hacked cameras is a sign of things to come," he explains.
"These attacks will continue to grow in size and the sheer number of IoT devices being used will amplify the attack power to Tb/ps of capacity.
It's going to become essential for operators to mitigate with fine-grained filtering and rate limiting of attack traffic in order to differentiate their service offerings and keep subscribers happy.
As far as virtualisation goes, Cullen says operators worldwide are working to virtualise their infrastructure.
"There are already some live virtual deployments, but they are not at the scale many operators hoped for," he explains.
"In 2017, we will see high profile deployments that begin to reap the benefits of virtualisation as vendor solutions become more mature, deliver scalability, and get 'good enough' orchestration to roll out services.
Cullen also adds that as growth and revenue has flattened out, telecoms operators around the world are digging deeper to improve their bottom line and meet business goals.
"They're beginning to learn how to leverage the vast sets of information they now have," he says.
"This will impact every area of telecom business, including the network, where intelligence about subscriber behaviour and network performance will be more heavily relied upon for network and operational goals and investment decisions."
