Zhone Technologies ZTI-PG - Manual (Page 4)

 Z H O N E T E C H N O L O G I E S E T H E R N E T O V E R C O P P E R
Customer Demand for Advanced
Services
The customer segments for which EFM-based services are
potentially valuable fall into two distinct groups. The
first and broader group consists of small and medium-
sized organizations with inherently information- or
communication-intensive activity. These organizations
include commercial businesses as well as smaller public-
sector entities such as municipalities and schools — all
with reasonably similar networking requirements today.
The needs of smaller remote locations of larger organiza-
tions are also very similar, with a few specific require-
ments for cross-organization connectivity that go beyond
those of independent small businesses or organizations.
The second group is the cellular operator community, in
particular the last-mile backhaul connectivity to their cell
towers.
Changes in communication and information processing
are increasing demand for bandwidth and more sophisti-
cated services in both groups. For small/medium organi-
zations (or SMOs), applications continue to involve ever
richer content, with more and higher-resolution digital
imagery, and increasing amounts of video content and
videoconferencing. The software-as-service model is
growing robustly in these segments because of its attrac-
tive economics especially for smaller-scale operations,
increasing network traffic along the way. For large
organizations with distributed operations, the steady
increase in data-driven processes and management
approaches is turning remote sites into essentially small
data centers. This is particularly prevalent in the retail
segment. The mission-critical role of IT in these distrib-
uted operations complicates and increases the importance
of high-uptime, seamless network connectivity.
For wireless operators, the advent of 3G smartphones
with easy-to-use interfaces and compelling network-
based applications has substantially accelerated growth in
cellular wireless data traffic. This traffic growth is quickly
outpacing the ability of operators to put up new cell sites
or tap new spectrum bands to accommodate it, so the
capacity utilization of existing sites continues to rise.
Since the capacity of a radio network is only as good as
the bandwidth of its connection back to the core
network, the rising utilization of 3G and 3.5G cell sites is
creating similarly rising demand for backhaul
connectivity.