Communication plays an ever-increasing role for critical infrastructure providers. Communication provides mission critical information to help critical infrastructure service providers carry out their missions better. However, as Jimmy Bakakis, Sales Director Critical Infrastructure, explains to Dr.Dahlit Brin, existing communication systems face many challenges. Watch this video to find out what these are and why this poses a serious problem.
Full interview transcript:
Welcome back to the Backhaul Lounge, I'm Dahlit Brin, and I'm joined again by Jimmy Bakakis, who is our Director Critical Infrastructure. We're continuing our fascinating discussion concerning communication challenges faced by critical infrastructure providers. Now, Jimmy, welcome back.
Hi Dahlit. It's good to be back.
Lovely to see you again. Last time you explained to us that critical infrastructure providers essentially are service providers who bring us a range of services to help keep society running as safely and pleasantly as we want it to be. And you explained that, today, communication is actually critical - mission critical - even to help them run their operations better and more efficient. Now, we left at the point where I wanted to know, you know, why the current communication system that they actually use are not up to scratch, and what the challenges are that they're facing today with their existing communication networks.
So, the needs are constantly changing, so as technology advances further, you have a variety of applications, a variety of devices, all sorts of things that are being added to these networks. So, things like high-definition cameras or
applications that run analytics, visualization software. All these added features require higher capacity and bandwidth than what was previously needed or what's currently in place today. So, in essence, what we're looking at is we need to create a much bigger pipe to transport much larger data at faster speeds, in some cases over longer distances, and, of course, in a much shorter time.
Ok, so I understand they need more bandwidth, a higher capacity in order to actually
use modern communication technology to help them carry out their missions better. Is there anything else?
Yes, there is actually Dahlit. So all these applications that I referred to, they all rely on low latency. So latency being the time it takes to transmit a certain amount of data over the network. So low latency is extremely important to transmitting that data quickly with no delays. This becomes extremely important in cases like video transmission, for instance, where a delay can cause a drop in the feed or interrupt the transmission of any of the pertinent data that's traveling. So, the reliability of the connectivity is extremely important as well. If a connection experiences some sort of downtime, critical infrastructure agencies may lose that critical communication at a vital moment. They simply cannot tolerate this because in some cases that kind of could be the difference between a life and death situation.
Ok, so I understand that existing communication networks aren't able to cater for the needs of those new communication technologies, whether it's the real-time data transfer and real-time videos or large data analytics, as you mentioned. So, so critical infrastructure providers must invest in their networks to upgrade it in order to help use technology to carry out their missions much, much better. So, Jimmy, thank you so much for enlightening me again today.
What now, obviously, is a burning question is what can we, as Ceragon, do to help critical infrastructure providers? We're going to talk about this next time. So at this point, I want to thank you again for joining us. And we'll see you again in part three of our little mini-series.
Thank you for having me, Dahlit. And looking forward to the next conversation with you.
Absolutely. Thank you. This is the Backhaul Lounge. I'm Dahlit Brin. Thank you for joining us today. And I want to invite you, as always, to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. See you next time.
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