Next Generation Access – it’s the future

Next Generation Access (NGA) has the potential to change the internet as we know it.

I did an interview recently for The Telegraph on Next Generation Access (NGA) and how it will affect small businesses and the training industry.   www.telegraph.co.uk/nga

I have since had numerous people asking me what exactly is Next Generation Access.

In a nutshell it’s faster internet – but in reality it’s much deeper than this as NGA will revolutionise the way we work and will bring a whole host of new opportunities that we cannot even image at the moment.

If you consider the speed of the current internet the main problem is that it is very unpredictable – you might be paying for your 8Mbps access, but in reality you are probably getting much less.  According to Ofcom, average actual broadband download speeds in the UK were around 4.1Mbps in April 2009. According to a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology report in 2008, a typical NGA speed might be 30Mbps or more.

And the real pain is that the current internet isn’t predictable.  Driving on the M25 at 2am is a fantastic way to get around London, but would you say the same at 8.30 on a Monday morning? The internet is very similar as we are hitting the capacity of the infrastructure more and more often.  If you use a site that is hosted in the US, you will often notice a degradation of service in afternoon as the US wakes up and starts surfing and gobbling up bandwidth.

Unlike the motorway analogy, NGA will not just allow us to do more of what we do today, but it will also open up new opportunities that we probably haven’t even considered today.  This will include high definition video conferencing and cloud computing – Yes, we can do both of these today, but would you trust the speed of the current internet to talk to one of your key clients using unpredictable technology, where you get jerk-a-vision and a garbled voice every now and again - even Voice Over IP (VOIP) can be very hit and miss affair.

And, what we sometimes forget is that download speeds are considerably higher than upload speeds – The ‘A’ in ADSL stands for Asymmetric, which basically means that download and upload speeds are different.  Not good for high definition video conferencing which requires high bandwidth in both directions.

The same goes for cloud computing – would you want to bet moving all your company’s infrastructure into the cloud when you cannot guarantee the speed of access?  But, there is little doubt that cloud computing is the future.

If you go back 20 years, and looked at what the internet was and how it was used, it is very different to today.  It would have been hard to imagine some of the things that we can do today - streaming television, YouTube, Ebay, Skype, Google etc.  The same leap will happen again with NGA – it’s difficult to know exactly what the new landscape will look like, but I can guarantee it will be very different.  I doubt whether you will have any applications resident on your PC – it will be all in the cloud which is the vision of many major software companies and being driven through platforms such as Microsoft Azure.  Will the IPod be a thing of the past? Why would you want to store music when you could stream it live from the cloud to whatever device you wanted – car radios will have gone from 8-track, to tape, to CD, to IPod/MP3 to the cloud. Only our imagination will hold us back.

So, how does NGA affect training?  With high definition video conferencing becoming the new Instant Messenger, we can expect to see classes broadcast directly to companies and to homes.  People will be able to access labs and scenarios in real-time from server farms and be part of very sophisticated virtual reality classrooms.  QA is already leading the way with this technology under the QA Virtual brand – this already includes virtual classrooms, unique QA authored 3-D elearning courses for PRINCE2 and ITIL V3 and a delegate Web 2.0 collaboration portal.  With NGA we will be pushing this even further; watch this space...

Bill