We stand in the midst of a technological revolution. The complexity, scale, and more importantly, the pace, are unlike anything humankind has experienced before. The speed of current technological breakthroughs is disrupting almost every industry in every country while the breadth and depth of these disruptions are fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and communicate with each other.
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum in Geneva, has framed recent technological revolution as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to Schwab, the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that started a few decades ago, but is currently expanding with enormous intensity. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
The Four Stages of Industrial Revolution
In parallel, the networking industry is following a similar revolution. The First Network Revolution was the invention of telephone by Alexander Graham Bell that introduced a new medium of personal communication. The Second Network Revolution was the appearance of wide area network (WAN) and packet transport that brought the dawn of digital communication. The Third introduced multiple networking protocols such as TCP/IP, SMTP, BGP; culminating with the introduction of consumer internet services, mass digitization, and cloudification. Similarly, the Fourth Network Revolution is building on the Third, characterized by the emergence of advanced algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that automates the implementation, analysis, and operation of networks.
The Four Stages of Network Revolution
The Fourth Network Revolution is characterized by three distinct traits: ubiquitous access, exponential growth, and big data. The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and ubiquitous network access, are unlimited. And these possibilities are further expanded by proliferation of connected devices, industrial Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, advanced robotics, and more. This rate of acceleration, when compared to previous Network Revolution, has no historical precedent. The Fourth Network Revolution is evolving at an exponential rate of growth rather than a traditional linear pace, disrupting almost every aspect of the networking industry. Finally, consumers and businesses alike are at the epicenter of the digital economy, generating massive amounts of data. Network analytics help operators proactively predict, adapt, and respond to the business environment while delivering the ultimate customer experience.
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