HETEROGENEOUS OVER HYBRID By Tristan Wood With advancements in technology, and that, in particular, which carries data across our ether, hybrid connectivity has become increasingly popular as a means to optimizing communications. Promising a seamless integration of multiple network technologies, it aims to provide enhanced reliability, flexibility, and performance. However, upon closer examination, what many believe to be hybrid connectivity, isn’t truly hybrid. First and foremost, we need to think differently and take a close look at the “classic networking approach,” and how failover, whilst offering a degree of resilience and redundancy, isn’t truly hybrid. Despite its apparent benefits, hybrid does not truly embody the essence of hybrid connectivity. Failover refers to the ability of a system to switch to a backup connection when the primary connection fails. While failover mechanisms do indeed provide a level of redundancy, they do not fundamentally transform the nature of the connectivity architecture. As a consequence, the degree of resilience is inherently constrained. In a truly hybrid – or “heterogeneous” – network, multiple network technologies seamlessly work together, actively sharing the load and resources, combining and binding together a variety of bearers from cellular and LTE to satellite and Wi-Fi into a single “pipe.” In this way, it can deliver a faster and, more importantly, more reliable service. In fact, a truly hybrid platform should go a stage further than that, accommodating and configuring itself for a range of other variables, depending upon each bearer’s performance and other environmental conditions affecting it at any one moment in time to optimize performance and reduce costs – but we’ll touch on that later. When optimized in this way, a hybrid system is capable of working through degradation and failure to ensure that single TCP connections are maintained ‘Hybrid connectivity’ isn’t always truly hybrid 28 CHANNELVISION | JULY - AUGUST 2023
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=