Meta's mission is to connect disparate environments so that they can allow people to live and work in the virtual space.
This will have a significant impact on our networks. We are not just talking about a need to be constantly connected, without glitch; we are talking about fully immersive content streaming in 4K and 8K, with low latency and minimal lag.
We need to be able to go from one experience to another without being distracted by anything that suggests we are not in a seamless virtual environment.
Virtual life seems like it's more difficult than moving to Mars.
It is possible to travel to our new virtual world without being stuck. We need to make sure we put in place the basics for virtual life.
We have the chance to make the metaverse a place where our virtual selves can thrive, not just survive.
Bandwidth is important.
We will need a lot of bandwidth to make this work. We can't function in a metaverse without bandwidth, like water is a building block of life. We need high-speed connections that can support different applications in the metaverse.
To support our under- connected and underserved communities, bandwidth must be widespread and affordable. Equal opportunities for everyone to create and explore are what virtual world visions often center on. We need to ensure a level playing field in the real world for that to happen.
It's as important as air for low latency.
Meta life is not good if we engage with theavatar for several seconds and then stop. lag when streaming live sports or gaming online will only get worse when we are trying to fully immerse ourselves into a virtual world
Edge computing, which can reduce network latency and improve reliability, will become more important in networks that need real-time responsiveness.
The infrastructure of the metaverse is virtual hardware.
We need to fix hardware breaks. We need to be able to survive without that piece of hardware. We should have used virtualized functions for much of what the metaverse requires, because this can't happen in a metaverse.
Infrastructure functions can be deployed using virtual machine and container concepts where they can be deployed across the network in real time. Routing and switching are classic network functions that need to be fully virtualized. They need to be easy to update and deploy.
The mayor of the metaverse is software intelligence.
The metaverse needs to be software-defined to act quickly. It is the same as a local government or council being able to repair our roads, remove the trash and control traffic in real time. This happens in real life without us knowing, until it stops working and we wonder what happened.
The key to helping speed the delivery of network rollouts is the use of automation and artificial intelligence.
An adaptive virtual network will be able to identify a fault and self-heal, without the need for a truck-roll. When required, it can draw resources from unused areas to ramp up other parts of the metaverse.
We will hear a lot of talk about the metaverse over the next few years, but it will not happen without network innovations. The future metaverse will be even more important of a foundation than the current cloud apps are.
The building blocks for a hospitable metaverse are already there for the artist formerly known as Facebook, and as those technologies continue to evolve, Meta will have more world-building tools to work with.
It is not easy to build a virtual universe, but we can bring it closer to reality through proper network infrastructure investments and innovation.
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