Year 4K?        
When it comes to 4K video we are entering a chicken-and-egg situation. There is not much 4K content available at the moment as there are not really any 4K enabled devices on the market yet, and why would you buy a 4K device, when there’s no 4K content to view? With the rate at which smartphones and tablets are evolving, we are likely to overcome this hurdle in the near future, and when we do it will this will have a significant impact on the already overstretched telco network.

But 4K video doesn’t necessarily mean four times the traffic. In reality, content like this will be cached so it can be accessed locally so will not travel along the whole network backbone each time it is accessed. The days when internet service providers can be safe in the knowledge that consumers don’t expect to be able to get HD content on the go are numbered as we’re becoming increasingly greedy when it comes to our content.

Connecting the cloud
Now that we’ve jumped over the first hurdles of understanding cloud computing, we are seeing a rapid growth in full scale adoption. More cloud computing means more data centers and these data centers all need to be connected, which is leading to a huge increase in network traffic.

On top of this, cloud data centers have to be distributed globally in order to serve local customers, so we are seeing a huge growth of M2M traffic in particular. Unlike the Internet of Things, this is large scale M2M traffic between customers and the Cloud rather than between devices, and it’s proving to be the second largest drive of internet traffic after video.

Over the next year this will only increase further and cloud providers need to make sure they are partnering with networks that can scale-up bandwidth as-needed and shoulder the load.

3D gaming - moving to the next level
3D is the next logical step for the next generation of gaming but it has been slow to get off the starting block. Kickstarter project Occulus Rift could be a serious disruptor, and if it takes off next year we are likely to see rapid growth of virtual reality style games.

Operators are going to have more bandwidth hungry applications on their hands, especially if they are streamed in real-time.

But it’s not just up to the network operators to ensure a smooth ride for gamers. Console makers and publishers need to upgrade their server back-end before it even reaches the network, to ensure a seamless experience of gamers. Outages in online gaming have been rife in recent years and without the right infrastructure in place, games publishers risk the wrath of the consumer as downtime just won’t be tolerated.

Green energy
The need for environment-friendly solutions is at an all-time high. There is increasing pressure from government target to cut carbon emissions, and earlier this year BT pledged to cut the carbon it emits by three times.

The answer will be to find innovative technologies that can get the job done but use less power. It's becoming increasingly fashionable to build your data center somewhere cold and remote, where cooling is free and renewable energy flows from water or wind power. Facebook for example, has just located its newest data center on the edge of Arctic Circle. But every little reduction in power consumption helps, and operators need to look at energy efficient ways of upgrading capacity without having to lay more fibre, like photonic integration, which can upscale network capacity tenfold without rolling out any additional fiber.