The Metaverse and the network

CTO interviews part 1: Stephen Alexander

"The inability to precisely predict how we'll use it [the Metaverse], and how it will change our daily life, is not a flaw. Rather, it is a prerequisite for the Metaverse's disruptive force."

The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball, 2022.

CTO Interview 

Stephen Alexander's trusty 20-year-old dishwasher finally stopped working during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, getting spare parts shipped to the US was impossible, so Alexander, the CTO of Ciena (pictured), resorted to 'how-to' YouTube videos and got bits from eBay.

It highlighted the power of the online experience, something set to ramp significantly with the advent of the Metaverse.

The Metaverse refers to immersive virtual worlds where people will meet to socialise, learn, work and play.

During the pandemic, Ciena also experienced how the online experience can benefit work. The company used the network to guide remote data centre staff wearing virtual-reality headsets in operating its equipment.

Ciena also used high-resolution audio-visual equipment to continue development work during the pandemic. A solitary engineer in the lab would conduct measurements, sending the results to engineers working remotely.

"So we had started down this path where it [the Metaverse] is not just gaming but has got some interesting business applications," says Alexander.

Metaverse survey

Ciena commissioned a recent survey on the Metaverse and its work uses. The systems vendor wanted to know how the customers of its customers view the emerging technology and how they would use it.

"What it [the Metaverse] represents for us is a use case," says Alexander. "It's an application space for this [networking] infrastructure we are all building."

The study surveyed 15,000 people worldwide. Nearly all (96%) see the value of virtual meetings, while more than three-quarters (78%) say they would use more immersive experiences such as the Metaverse. However, two in five (38%) of the respondents said unreliable networking performance was a concern holding their organisations back.

Alexander, like many, spent his days in virtual meetings during the pandemic. In the mornings, he would talk to teams in Europe, in the middle of the day to the Americas, and in the evenings to the Asia Pacific. "It was a very efficient use of time," he says.

But such tools are less effective for getting to know people. "You don't have the ability to go to dinner, have coffee, go for a drink, that sort of thing," he says.

Online meetings of up to 20 people are also limiting. Conversations are one-to-many unlike an in-person meeting where multiple parallel interactions occur.

"With a more immersive Metaverse environment where you have a virtual-reality capability, maybe we can start to do those things," he says.

Alexander says that with the many areas of interactions, you can ask how many would be improved using augmented reality/ virtual reality.

Healthcare and education

Alexander experienced other benefits of online interactions, such as telemedicine, during the pandemic. But also some shortfalls. "What could have been done to improve the online education experience?" he says.

In a Metaverse-enabled world, education could enable high-school students to experience different types of work before deciding their career path. They could 'join' professionals - an airline pilot, a nurse, a doctor - to experience their working day.

"You plop on the headset, or you go into your 'holodeck' or advanced zoom environment and spend some hours or a day experiencing what that person's life is like and what they do," says Alexander. "That's a huge educational potential enabled by this augmented reality/ virtual reality-enhanced world."

Takeaways

One takeaway from Ciena's commissioned survey is how widespread the acceptance of this future development is, says Alexander. There is also a broad interest in using the Metaverse for business applications.

The survey also highlighted some intriguing ideas.

Alexander says he looks forward to catching up with a former work colleague, but that this rarely happens due to their day-to-day commitments.

"You can imagine this world where his avatar and my avatar run into each other, and they talk about what's going on in their lives and all the other things," says Alexander. "And they come back, and we get a download from the evening."

Network upshot

Alexander says that for some years, he has been saying that the network must get faster, the cloud has to get closer to the network edge, and infrastructure must get more intelligent.

These trends will benefit the Metaverse.

Latency is one crucial networking performance parameter.

Any end-device connected to the cloud has specific requirements regarding how it interacts and the latency it needs. For example, a latency of 100ms is ok when watching streaming video, but for gaming, that is too long; a headset requires a latency in the tens of milliseconds. Controlling an automated forklift truck is even more demanding. Here, tolerable latency is in single-digit milliseconds.

"That tells you, in some sense, where the edge of the cloud has to be," says Alexander. "It just says that from the device to the cloud and back, it better be a certain physical distance as there is the speed of light issue."

Network capacity also plays a role if the edge device generates enormous amounts of data - a petabyte, for example - and there is a timeliness to receiving an answer, even if it is a yes or no.

What network endpoints generate such massive amounts of data?

Alexander cites the example of synthesised designer drugs based on a person's human genome. "If you have cancer, knowing that and getting the drug today, this week, this month is a whole lot different than getting it next year," he says.

Other examples driving bandwidth he cites include military and agriculture (crops and livestock) applications.

"This is why this kind of a survey is so useful to us because we can go to our customers, whether they be cloud hyper-giants or to service providers and have a conversation about not what they are provisioning today, but what they're going to provision in two to five years," says Alexander.

This helps Ciena have better conversations with its customers about what they will need and should consider.

Planning

Staff at Ciena don't yet have the word 'Metaverse' in their job titles.

Instead, staff are developing the next-generation WaveLogic coherent digital signal processor (DSP) family to drive the lowest cost-per-bit, highest capacity for fibre. Other Ciena employees are addressing network intelligence and automation; while others still are tackling routing, switching and the dynamic edge.

All applications require some flavour of these technologies, says Alexander.

The Metaverse is in its infancy in terms of use cases, with gaming being one prominant example.

"But you can imagine this can go for education, healthcare, and normal business interactions," says Alexander. "It gets people's juices flowing; look at the potential once we have high-capacity, low-latency connections to the cloud, and cloud is instantiated in enough local data centres that you can process things very quickly.”

Once that happens, people across industries will ask what they can do.

"That's where you're going to start to see the kind of the vectors of progress get established," he says. "But common things that we see - capacity, connectivity, the ability to have a simpler, faster, more dynamic edge - those are key to enabling all this."