IBM is also busy innovating on the network edge with a variety of solutions. “Pushing applications, processing and storage to the edge of the mobile network allows large, complex problems to be distributed into many smaller and more manageable pieces, and to be physically located at the source of the information it needs to work on,” said Phil Buckellew, vice president of IBM Enterprise Mobile. “This enables a huge amount of rich data to be processed in real time that would be prohibitively complex and costly to deliver on a traditional centralized cloud.”

The next big evolution in networking, however, will be software-defined networking (SDN), which distributes network resources and intelligence by abstracting and virtualizing network components. Full-scale adoption of SDN is still quite a ways off and has yet to be standardized, but it’s wildly promising and, again, relies on intelligence outside the core to improve performance and decrease latency at a lower cost than was previously attainable. There are many vendors developing SDN solutions, including big dogs like Cisco and Oracle, but one of the most innovative is Nuage Networks, which recently partnered with Alcatel-Lucent to create the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), a sort of advanced cloud that dynamically adapts services to network policies.

Don’t fear the edge

CSPs must trim costs while maintaining quality of service (QoS) even as revenues decline and service consumption and complexity increase. The era of “more with less” has changed the way they approach networks and how they define the edge.

Choi Jin-sung, executive VP and head of research and development for SK Telecom’s information and communications technology (ICT) division, sees the necessity of new networking solutions: “Telecom providers are realizing that optimized transmission of data alone can no longer guarantee success in the market.”

Words change meaning over time. Less than a decade ago the acronym EDGE meant “Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution”—in other words, fast mobile data. But today EDGE is a snail compared to 4G LTE, so its definition has fallen by the wayside. Of course, if you look up wayside in the New Oxford American Dictionary, it means “the edge of a road,” but the edge of the network is where CSPs must journey if they hope to build the networks of tomorrow.