21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

26 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue from the industry Virtual Reality VR is a simulated experience that can be used for entertainment, education and business. VR requires a form of immersion through a headset or a projected environment. As this uses a visual environment there is a high data requirement with queueing of visuals depending of the direction the user is facing. Interaction and reality allows the user to experience a reality. Online Gaming Gaming has always required broadband, moving into more immersive gaming and higher graphics; this has not stopped. Allowing multiplayer cooperation requires all of the user interfaces to be synchronized. Online gaming has been synomous with lag, with players complaining that the latency is too high and ping times poor. Online gaming has been using better and better graphics, pushing more data through the net. Remote Work COVID-19 has changed the way we work. With lockdown enforcing upon us a work-from-home environment, the amount of data sent for business purposes has increased. Ensuring connectivity in business requires a significant amount of data to be transferred. Many companies are not allowing data to be stored locally but work through virtual access, where the data remains in the confines of the company but the images are transferred to the user. The statistics tell us around 25% of the total workforce working from home (Global Workplace Analytics). Data has been kept on a company network until working from home, and now has been moved into a broadband network. Education As with working remotely, remote education was enforced worldwide in 2020, with all students sent home. However remote education has improved, enabling remote and rural areas to ensure education needs. Augmented reality Enhancing reality by using the environment you are in and adding a visual layer on top drives a new level of reality. Overlaying cable plans onto the trenching workers displays is one example that allows trenching to see what is under the ground. AR is not just for gaming and entertainment. In construction, cable plans have to be clear and ready so when they start digging up roads the workers don’t hit any cables. The use of AR in this instance overlays the cable plan to the screen so the JCB operator can avoid the cables. Direct connection User interfaces are getting smaller and soon they will be too small for us to see anything. What will be the display of the future? Glasses, contact lenses, neural connections, head- up displays, holograms and holographic environments – the prospects are limited only by our imagination and increasingly by sustainability targets. 4/8/16/32K streaming 4K has a total of 3,840 by 2,160 or 8,294,400 pixels and 8K doubles these numbers to 7,680 by 4,320 or 33,177,600 pixels. 16K is 15,360 by 8,640 or 132,710,400 pixels and 32K 30,720 by 17,280 or 530,841,600 pixels. The expectation is a requirement of 50Mbps to ensure that 8K can function. With viewing changing towards streaming a family of four (two adults two children), the current UK average download speed is 50,4Mbps (Ofcom, March 2021), this would allow only one person viewing an 8K stream. IoT Internet of Things (IoT) is a physical object with sensors, processing ability, software or other technology embedded. These connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet or another communication system. With the expectation of 22 billion IoT devices by 2025, the amount of data these devices use is set to increase; Cisco estimated that 500 zettabytes (zettabyte = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 byte) of data per year would be used in 2019 just by IoT devices.