By 2016, there will be nearly 18.9 billion network connections, almost 2.5 for every person on the planet, compared with 10.3 billion in 2011, according to a new survey from Cisco. Already, Gen Y workers want--make that, require--anytime, anywhere access via their mobile devices. So what's a company to do? Nomadix is addressing the skyrocketing network demands with two new products--a high-speed Wi-Fi access appliance and an Internet traffic optimizer.
"What's really driving this demand is BYOD," says Fred Reeder, chief commercial and operating officer at Nomadix. "It's not just people bringing their own devices, but people bringing multiple devices and wanting connectivity." Throw in the growing use of video--by 2016, 1.2 million video minutes is expected to travel the Internet every second, according to Cisco--and bandwidth demand is outpacing enterprises and service providers' abilities to handle this volume at affordable prices, he says.
The low-profile Nomadix AG 5800 tackles anytime, anywhere access demands with support for 250 to 4,000 simultaneous devices. Based on the VxWorks real-time, multitasking operating system, it can manage bandwidth by group, subscriber, device or a combination of the three, according to the company. It also supports data offloading.
Built on Intel's high-performance i7 Core processor, the Nomadix Internet Traffic Optimizer (NITO) is an edge device that sits between the ISP router and the Nomadix gateway, and facilitates intelligent bandwidth management and allocation. NITO identifies the type of traffic through deep-packet inspection and will prioritize it to ensure optimum performance, with minimal latency, he says.
Increasing network demands are a concern for enterprises, according to Gerry Purdy, principal analyst at MobileTrax. "There's a lot of pressure building on offloading Wi-Fi and cellular traffic," he says. "This explosion of network traffic requires optimization, techniques and services that are enabling this access."
Of course, costs are a factor, as well. "The biggest enterprise bandwidth issue is how to deal with their cellular data costs that used to be fixed and now are variable," adds Purdy. "On the Wi-Fi side, they have to provide 'forward' to the employee, and need to upgrade from [802.11]g to n and increase backhaul to support the needs."
Both Nomadix products are available immediately.
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