Facebook recently changed their company name as “Meta” and claimed that they will turn into a “Metaverse” in the near future. Metaverse, as a concept of interacted 3D world, are expected to involve wide aspects of our life. If Metaverse is to come, requirement of network will be higher in terms of bandwidth, latency and reliability.   

Bandwidth

Network bandwidth is sometimes misunderstood as "network speed", but it is not. Bandwidth can be used to measure how much data can be transmitted per unit of time.

To describe it as a road, low bandwidth can be understood as a two-lane highway, and high bandwidth can be understood as four lanes, eight lanes or even more lanes.

The more lanes you can pass more vehicles in the same amount of time. This is the value of high bandwidth, and there will be more high-bandwidth transmissions per unit of time.

Different from current Internet applications, Metaverse's need for bandwidth far exceeds the former. For example, most of the previous games are 2D, and the network bandwidth associated with this is only tens of KB, because such a bandwidth only allows such games to run.

But at present, under the bandwidth of 100M and Gigabit, the games that can be run are hundreds of people online, and the screen is also 3D. The amount of data that needs to be transmitted at the same time is thousands of times that of before, and our bandwidth is also growing rapidly.

The immersive experience required in the Metaverse era, with an unlimited number of people running at the same time, will have a higher demand for bandwidth. With the arrival of the Metaverse era, the criticized 5G will eventually find its own strength.

Latency

The biggest and least understood challenge at the network layer: latency. Latency refers to the time required for data to travel from one point to another and back (Rount trip time) .

The concepts of synchronous and asynchronous are introduced here.

Let's start with asynchrony. When we send a wechat message, we don't care if it takes 10 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds or longer to actually send it. 

If your video delay increases temporarily—or even a few seconds instead of a few milliseconds—the software can improve the user experience by increasing the playback speed of the backlog audio and quickly editing blanks. In addition, participants can easily overcome the delay-just wait for a while.

The main line of the story of the film "Project Hummingbird" is to shorten this 1 millisecond for high-frequency trading by establishing a "straightest optical fiber" that does not allow any turning. An online transaction takes an average of 17 milliseconds. Even if I am only 1 millisecond faster than others, and I earn 1 cent per share with 1,000 shares, I can earn 10 yuan; I do 200,000 such transactions every day for 10 yuan each time. There are 252 days a year, which is equivalent to making 500 million yuan a year.

Subspace, a company, uses a technology like CDN (Content Distribution Network) to solve the problem of current latency for players to enjoy games in Metaverse. They deploy hardware in hundreds of cities and then coordinates with many third parties and have also established a fiber-optic network cluster, splicing various fiber-optic networks to further shorten the distance between servers, and minimize the use of non-fiber cables.

Reliability

Reliability is a whole concept, like a video site that advertises 4K quality, but the reality is that at some point the video doesn't deliver 4K quality.

Reliability is not only for service providers, but also for users, because users are also in a dynamically changing environment. For example, if the speed of the 5G network is reduced to the 4G network, the previous picture quality is not suitable, because this will not only face the consequences of the picture quality degradation, but also directly disconnect the network.

For example, Netflix take some measures in order to pursue reliability: 

1. Algorithm "observes" a scene with a blue sky, and then decides that if the viewer's network speed drops, the 500 different shades of blue can be reduced to 300, 100, or 50. This is the reliability under 500 shades. In Metaverse, the reliability would be under 1000, 2000, or 5000 shades. 

2. Netflix also uses idle bandwidth to send video to the user's device before the user needs it in case that the connection drops temporarily or the delay increases. In addition, Netflix will pre-download content on the local node. That sounds like CDN so people can get the cache to make things quicker. This is not possible for videos or data created in real time. 

Since reliability is a whole concept, higher requirement of network transmission issues such as visual quality will arise demand of better technology to make it stable. 

Conclusion

Metaverse can be an inevitable process of the network development. Even if popularity of interacted 3D content would be much slower than that we estimate, bandwidth, latency and reliability are supposed to keep improving since entertainment in video and games are increasing, and the history also indicates it. 

The content end represented by online games is the vanguard of the explosion of the meta-universe concept, and now the hardware field seems to have begun to receive market attention. In addition to the electronics field, the subdivision of communications is also expected to benefit from the construction of Metaverse. Giants enter the market by running and increase Metaverse investment. The realization of Metaverse requires the support of the underlying architecture, back-end foundation and front-end equipment, and finally its application to specific scenarios, which highly depends on the maturity of 5G, cloud computing, advanced semiconductors and other technologies. The traffic outbreak takes the lead in infrastructure construction, the North American epidemic resumes, and subsequent data center investment increases, which is expected to drive the demand for the optical module industry chain.

As a high-end optical communication hardware and software production and service manufacturer, C-light provides 400G transceivers, IDC platform and peripheral products to support construction and development for Metaverse.