Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

SD-WAN for Home Morphs to Include Cellular

Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, CEO and co-founder of Mushroom Networks

For last year’s prediction, we began by discussing the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the business community. Unfortunately, for this year’s prediction, we must again bow our heads to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, and accept that we are now living in a different world than just two years ago. The Delta variant is raging, and even as we (hopefully) get the upper hand on this pandemic over the next year, the business landscape has likely been transformed permanently. Remote work is here to stay.

What this means for many workers is that their home internet connectivity must now do double (or triple) duty every day. Work requirements are much less forgiving than typical home use where a poor connection or sudden drop in bandwidth (which happens all the time due to ISP throttling and general internet conditions) is simply an inconvenience as your streaming movie stalls or your favorite website takes forever to load. In a work-from-home scenario, this same poor internet connection can now result in dropped or poor-quality VoIP calls or teleconferences with important clients or investors, stalled file uploads or downloads, and unnecessary time-wasting as performing everyday business activities now takes longer than it should due to poor home internet connectivity.

Many businesses have significantly improved their connectivity performance and reliability by using SD-WAN technology where two or more wired lines are intelligently orchestrated. But home and home-office internet connectivity continues to struggle. I predict that these very effective traditional SD-WAN approaches for home use will continue to be slow in adoption during 2022. There are several reasons for this:

• Corporate IT teams have been hesitant to make additional connectivity investments (such as an extra wired line) for remote workers. Having two or more wired lines at a branch office that serves many employees is far more attractive financially than dedicating IT resources for individual remote workers at their homes.
• Home and home-office users will continue to explore less expensive (and significantly less capable) solutions that offer the promise of speed and reliability but ultimately simply do not live up to expectations. Inexpensive traditional link-load balancers and cloud-based software solutions cannot match the performance and reliability of current SD-WAN devices and algorithms.

So, while I predict that 2022 will be slow going for traditional SD-WAN solutions in the home/home-office space, I also predict that we will see some traction in cellular plus wire-based SD-WAN solutions for home and home-office use. This approach is ideal because it requires no additional internet connections as nearly all remote workers already have the resources (home ISP and cellphone) needed to implement this solution.

Aggregating wired and wireless internet connections in an SD-WAN environment has been a challenge for the industry due to the widely varying characteristics between the transports. The important metrics are the available bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss, and the unpredictable fluctuations of these metrics with respect to time has made combining them very difficult. However, with the latest and most advanced SD-WAN algorithms from Mushroom Networks, and SD-WAN devices, such as the Portabella-Home, it is now possible to efficiently combine the widely varying cellular connection with a much steadier, high performance wired line. The resultant connectivity provides higher throughput, better overall performance, and higher reliability than either of the individual connections by themselves.

The most capable of the SD-WAN devices also support advanced features such as application specific bonding algorithms, traffic management and prioritizations, and QoS (quality of service). Most of these advanced algorithms work “straight out of the box” with no user intervention needed. However, highly sophisticated customization may also be performed via a user-friendly web interface, if desired.

So, traditional SD-WAN methods of combining two or more wired lines to form a more robust, high performance and high reliability internet connection will continue to struggle for adoption for the home/home-office market. However, this will be coupled with an uptick in adoption for the new paradigm in SD-WAN technology – combining a high-performing wired line from the home user’s ISP with the widely varying cellular signal using the home user’s mobile connection.  

This is consistent with the larger overall trend as networking continues to move in the “automation” direction, aka “networks on autopilot”. This will be most beneficial for home and home-office users, who are not generally very tech savvy. Using a “plug-and-play” SD-WAN device, such as the Portabella-Home, that seamlessly combines their home wired ISP with their cellphone, without requiring any IT support, is an appealing solution that will continue to gain traction in 2022.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Cahit Jay Akin is the CEO and co-founder of Mushroom Networks, a long-time supplier of SD-WAN infrastructure for enterprises and service providers. Prior to Mushroom Networks, Dr. Akin spent many years as a successful venture capitalist. Dr. Akin received his Ph.D. and M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. Dr. Akin has worked on technical and research aspects of communications for over 20 years including authoring several patents and many publications. Dr. Akin was a nominee for the Most Admired CEO award by San Diego Business Journal.