This may sound like the bleedin' obvious to you, but in planning that we have begun to look at refreshing core network infrastructure at work, it is notable that the world seems to be heading for fatter, low-latency data, and that that proves a substantial challenge for corporate network design.
In the old days, the world was a combination of files of a relatively small size, and relatively low latency real time connections required for the delivery of usually client-server applications. These days, the challenges are far greater. We have, thanks to Moore's law, the ability to generate vast files that the edges of the network just can't handle (it's not uncommon for our creative staff to produce files in excess of 1Gbyte, which their opto-core processor workstations can do with relative ease). We are also seeing more moves towards real-time or streamed collaborative tools (from WebEx through to Wave) that require fair to middling data bandwidth, but with low latency on the network to make them coherent. And then there is the explosion of network traffic that is video.
This is a real headache for managing IT in a corporate environment. When connections to the outside world are still measured in tens of megabits, other than for the largest of organisations, shipping really big stuff slowly, or medium-big stuff much more quickly, is a big challenge. Even more so when the domestic broadband providers have a marketing war of words about how many megabits they can provide to us for £9.99 a month. For the end consumer in a business setting, why the corporate network can't support all of these applications that seem to run fine in the domestic environment is a technical complexity that makes little sense.
mmitII 