Nokia Believes VR and AR Will Require A Highly Distributed Network

Nokia’s CTO Marcus Weldon believes that future networks will need to be highly distributed to enable high bandwidth and low latency for emerging applications such as AR and VR.

The use case Weldon apparently has in mind is for instance streaming of VR content from the edge of the network. In VR, to avoid simulator sickness, the lag time between a user wearing a VR headset turning his head and the motion being reflected on the graphics or video playing on the headset needs to be as low as a few milliseconds. To achieve this, the VR application needs to be running as close to the user as possible, at the edge of the network.

Weldon says that what is needed is a distributed access architecture combined with highly scalable cloud computing. This will push the network infrastructure closer to the user. He believes that local (in contrast to running everything in centralized cloud infrastructure) is going to become more important, which would naturally be good news to the cable industry and mobile network operators.