How Future network trends driving universal metaverse mobility?

The Indian industrialist and philanthropist Rattan Tata once said: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” In my opinion, his words are more applicable today than ever before. To enable greater collaboration in the years ahead, we need to build an amplified ecosystem with enhanced development capabilities supported by open interfaces, open source and open innovation. This amplified ecosystem will drive the integration of communication and compute resources into a continuous intelligent network compute fabric, where processing and intelligence can be offered anywhere. System energy efficiency is a fundamental design optimization parameter of the network compute fabric. Aside from the technical solutions, the ecosystem will also open up new, innovative business models in areas such as applications, advertisements, devices and payments to drive scale and customer efficiency. This includes optimizing consumer willingness to pay for any specific service, from the best effort to guaranteed quality of service. Extended reality (XR) and immersive communication will shape the coming decade and become a major advantage in the realization of not only completely virtual metaverses, but also in the embedding of virtual content into the physical environment. In last year’s trends article, the first trend focused on the technologies behind digital representation for the convergence of physical and digital worlds. Since then, I have observed huge investments in metaverse-related technologies such as devices, chipsets, development platforms and applications. This year, I have selected three network trends as the focus of my annual technology trends article: a unified network platform that enables business driven enterprise innovation; connectivity for an immersive user experience; and the quest for high-performing networks. A unified network platform will both support and drive the development of a wide variety of new, innovative enterprise use cases. Many of them will involve the delivery of easy-to-use immersive experiences by and between humans, as well as autonomous communication and operation between intelligent machines or between humans and machines. As such, the unified network platform will act as an open innovation platform connecting different ecosystems, facilitating collaboration and business growth. One of the keys to enhanced application innovation is the evolution of network user/developer interfaces through exposed, easy-to-use functions. This includes, for instance, functions that enable productivity, communication, collaboration, gaming and enhanced video. The unified network platform will offer aggregation capabilities that enable interoperability across the actors in the ecosystem to secure unified and global reach. These exposed network capabilities will optimize both application performance and user experience. The developer will have the freedom to select the level of differentiation depending on the application/consumer needs such as quality of experience, performance, security and privacy. One fundament of the unified network platform is the possibility to aggregate and enhance service exposure from different networks. Examples of exposed functions through open application programming interfaces (APIs) include prediction, spatial information, user identity, service authorization, instantaneous radio coverage and user density maps. To manage the different service provider network interfaces, the unified network platform will secure aggregation and routing of the exposed network functions. These network functions will be enhanced by integration of other value-adding functions originating from the global ecosystem. This can involve mediation and interoperability functions for spatial rights management, for example.