Can India's broadband network take-on the Metaverse challenge?

Ever since the announcement of the Metaverse, businesses in India and around the globe have started working on strategies to prepare themselves for this new virtual marketplace. According to a recent report by IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India) India is going to have 900 million internet users by 2025 which gives businesses all the more reason to gear up for the Metaverse.

While businesses and consumers continue to grapple with this new concept,"connectivity" still remains a critical issue that needs to be addressed first.

What do we know about the metaverse?

“Metaverse” has for sure become a bit of a buzzword, and if you casually asked someone to define it, there's a good chance they might struggle. The buzz around crypto and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) has only made the task of defining it trickier as various start-ups, futurists, venture capitalists, and tech giants vie to carve out their own space in the sector.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson, a science fiction author, coined the term “metaverse” in one of his novels, where he used it to describe a virtual reality world to which citizens escaped from an authoritative state. Today the metaverse is, or hopes to be, a fully visualized virtual world connecting people from around the globe. The core tenants of the metaverse are inter-connectivity and a near-authentic life held in the virtual space.

While the current metaverse doesn’t quite deliver at the levels described by Stephenson, projects like Decentraland are great examples of how the metaverse is starting to come to life. On the one hand these projects show the potential of the metaverse, on the other they also bring to fore some of the challenges we face while trying to make this digital dream come true. As far as the visual and aesthetics are concerned, many metaverse projects are still years behind what modern day video games offer, and user interaction is still limited and clumsy.

The road to Metaverse

A recent Gartner report said that by 2026 users will spend at least an hour every day in the metaverse. This will include shopping, work, and entertainment, all supported by a virtual economy backed by blockchain, using NFTs and digital currencies.

The infrastructure transformation required to cater to the needs of this immersive digital lifestyle is a herculean task. We could draw parallels with the journey of computing, where we are now used to computers the size of a smartphone, but it was a process which took decades of technological innovation.

The metaverse, in its ideal state, will be yet another bandwidth intensive application placing strain on the network, possibly the most demanding application yet. While most households may think they have the broadband speeds to handle living in the metaverse they don’t quite have the full picture.

According to Ookla's Speedtest Global Index for June 2022, with a fixed broadband mean speed of 71.79 Mbps, India was ranked 80th out of a total of 182 countries. The statistics don't seem that bad and show that broadband infrastructure in India has improved. However, experts suggest that for the best metaverse experience a minimum speed of 1 GBPS may be needed as more and more functionalities are added. 

When telecom companies talk about residential broadband speeds, they most often use the peak throughput speed of the last mile of a connection. This is the speed at which a customer’s circuit connects to the edge of the ISP’s network. While this benchmark is helpful for customers looking to purchase their broadband package, it ignores several key factors. Firstly, networks are usually oversubscribed, which means speeds can vary drastically depending on how many users are competing for bandwidth at a given point in time.

Secondly, broadband speeds aren’t symmetrical, by design. Most users receive significantly faster download speeds compared to their upload speeds. In our day to day lives we usually don't notice the difference in speeds as most of the applications we use rely on the download speeds like streaming movies and sports, gaming, shopping etc. As we enter the new age of hybrid working more and more applications utilise that upload bandwidth, workplace collaboration tools and video conferencing being the biggest culprits for this. The Metaverse will be just the same, demanding more from download but also requiring significant upload speeds in order to remain latency free and truly connected.

Going back to the Ookla Global Index for June 2022, the mean upload speed in India was 70.33 Mbps which was almost at par with the download speed of 71.79 Mbps, so for now India seems to be doing well on that front. However, we do have some distance to cover as far as the minimum bandwidth requirements of Metaverse are concerned.  So as we work towards achieving higher broadband speeds we'll have to make sure we don't focus solely on the download speeds but also towards symmetry in speeds.

Many telcos struggled with the unexpected rise in demand for bandwidth at the start of the pandemic. While this problem has stabilised, we can’t ignore the additional strain that applications like the metaverse will place on networks, nor the possibility of similar spikes in demand in the future.

Currently the issue is that there is not enough capacity between the access network and the content delivery networks (CDNs), to cope with the peak load of users. The more users, the slower the network, the slower the network, the less life-like your metaverse feels.

The solution, to increase broadband capacity, might sound simple but it is far from it. Carriers are continuing to experience high operating costs, while average revenue per user shows no sign of increasing anytime soon. It’s difficult to see where funding for new infrastructure would come from.

"Disaggregation"to metaverse’s rescue

Dis-aggregation is the practice of deploying network software separately from the hardware. Carriers have traditionally built their networks using monolithic systems which integrate software and hardware from a single vendor. This both locks them into an investment with one vendor and also traps them in a vicious cycle of slow and expensive hardware replacement. 

Disaggregation empowers telcos to select and deploy best-in-class hardware and software independently. Disaggregated systems can replace many functions within a telco’s network, from core and edge routers to Broadband Network Gateways. 

This has been pioneered by the arrival of high-volume, low-cost networking chips known as ‘merchant silicon’. The merchant silicon can be used to build a new category of powerful low-cost ‘bare-metal’ switches, which are often constructed on the very same outsourced assembly lines that manufacture traditional router systems.

These switches cost a fraction of conventional telco switches and routers but match performance. Alongside this new hardware movement, a new generation of networking software has also been created, turning bare-metal switches into feature rich IP/MPLS switches used in broadband networks.

Network disaggregation could transform the telecoms sector in the same way that AWS and Azure have transformed computing. Disaggregated hardware and software can be deployed using zero touch provisioning in a matter of minutes. Once installed, telcos can work within a single operating environment, instead of training their teams on multiple vendor systems and processes. Plus, upgrading the capacity of any dimension of a disaggregated system can be done in minutes, without throwing away existing infrastructure.

The meta verse is just one of many heavy-duty applications ready to put additional strain on networks. As the internet grows beyond what we see of it today and consumers demand more, operators are going to need to innovate and strive. Network dis-aggregation is the next logical step, offering telcos the agility, simplicity and scalability that matches cloud-native infrastructure. Today we’re looking at the meta verse but what will consumers demand tomorrow or in the next year?

Authored By: Pravin S Bhandarkar, Founder and CEO, RtBrick