New opportunities to collaborate
Over the last decade, Meta has invested billions in partnership with telecom companies, OEMs, policymakers, and the wider industry to improve connectivity around the world. From ongoing open, collaborative efforts such as the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), country-specific and international spectrum advocacy, and work with the Wi-Fi Alliance; to technologies like Magma, an open source software platform that helps operators deploy mobile networks, and subsea cables, we’ve seen the benefits of industry-wide collaborations to bring the world online to a faster internet. In fact, we announced today that our subsea cable investments in Europe and APAC have the potential to contribute over half a trillion USD in additional gross domestic product by 2025. In APAC alone, these efforts are expected to create up to 3.7 million new jobs.
A similar opportunity awaits the next generation of metaverse-ready networks. The need to simultaneously deliver enhanced speeds and ultra-low and uniform latency and jitter will stress both fixed and mobile networks. And achieving these benchmarks will require cross-layer and cross-domain optimizations.
For example, in today’s networks, the protocols and algorithms operating at the application layer — such as adaptive bit rate control loops for streaming video — do not have access to metrics on link quality and congestion from the physical layer. Similarly, protocols to optimize traffic congestion run mostly independent of one another, with some handled by content providers and others by network operators. We believe there’s an opportunity to realize significant gains by moving past this kind of siloed optimization and toward open interfaces for sharing metrics between OSI layers as well as network domains.
As we collaborate with the industry, there is also a need to define a common framework of how to measure and evaluate readiness for metaverse use cases of different levels of intensity. For example, in order to align on an industry-wide definition of a highly capable end-to-end network, we need to develop common quality of experience metrics and the role they play in evaluating network capabilities, and correlate the relationship between network quality of service metrics with user quality of experience metrics. At MWC and beyond, we plan to collaborate with TIP and partners to define the performance requirements for delivering great end-user experiences in the metaverse.
Collaborating with the industry to fuel ecosystem innovation
We’re excited to form new partnerships across the telecom ecosystem to tackle the challenges on the road to the metaverse.
Today at MWC, we’re announcing that Meta is working with Telefónica to establish a Metaverse Innovation Hub in Madrid to help accelerate metaverse network and device readiness through trials, metaverse-like experience use case and device testing, and more. Through this Metaverse Innovation Hub, Telefonica and Meta plan to provide local startups and developers with access to a groundbreaking 5G laboratory where they will be able to utilize a metaverse end-to-end testbed on Meta and Telefónica’s network infrastructure and equipment, as well as benefit from Telefónica’s open innovation ecosystem and Innovation and Talent Hub Resources, and Meta’s engineering support, tools, and resources.
A new beginning and a new future
There are no silver bullets when it comes to the connectivity challenges raised by the industry-wide push toward the metaverse. Overcoming these challenges will take a global effort that no single company, or even industry, is capable of sustaining on its own. But the lesson of the mobile era, which brought fast, reliable internet to billions of people, shows how powerful the connectivity industry can be when it works together to serve the world.
At MWC 2022, we’ll be hosting an industry discussion, in collaboration with TIP, on how to identify and characterize the interplay between network and application dynamics. Through this session, we’ll engage with the industry to build the case for developing a canonical readiness evaluation framework by grounding the discussion in ways to make networks and applications more aware of their respective capabilities. To learn more, visit https://tipbirdsofafeather2022.splashthat.com/.
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