Want to give users a close-to-earth experience? The Triple Challenges Facing Business Globalization

01 Online demand and user experience under the epidemic

Friedman pointed out in the book "The World Is Flat" that three waves have formed in the development of economic globalization, namely labor-intensive globalization, capital-intensive globalization, and knowledge-intensive digital globalization. change. Digital technology has brought a profound impact on the global business environment. The new crown epidemic has swept the world, and online connections have become the subject of communication. However, network issues have become an obstacle to business globalization.

Due to the surge in real-time online demand caused by the epidemic, the pressure on streaming media and video conferences that bear the brunt of global networks has increased dramatically. In order to prevent network congestion and avoid blurring of audio and video, YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+ are forced to reduce the resolution of users to reduce bandwidth pressure. The various video conferencing services that were launched hastily collapsed for a while.

Due to quarantine and travel restrictions brought about by the epidemic, there is a surge of heat from online entertainment outlets. According to a report from Southern Weekend, the average Chinese spends 196 minutes a day on mobile applications, and 500 million people use e-sports games as one of the main ways to relax at home. However, the network download speed is slow, the game is dropped, the freeze and other issues have seriously affected the user experience. Cross-border e-commerce shopping encounters problems such as slow order response and payment failure, and the loss of users will be very serious.

02 Network problems restrict the pace of business globalization

The current business globalization has become the core strategy of many mainstream Internet companies. Content-based business has also become a hot spot for globalization, and there are many manifestations in the tide of Chinese companies going overseas. Among Internet companies going overseas with content as the trend, games, live broadcasting, online education, pan-entertainment, and office collaboration have become popular options for companies.

For business globalization, the company will focus more on operations, and the underlying global service construction has become weak. However, the user experience of many businesses is often stuck in the underlying infrastructure when they are expanding.

In the current era of high redundancy in hardware configuration, most interactive and action game applications test no longer the configuration of the machine. The core experience lies in the timeliness of operational feedback. Whether players in different regions of the world can obtain a real-time and smooth experience is game operation. Fang's most basic guarantee. In addition to multi-dimensional user demands such as regional synchronization in different regions of the world, the one-time success rate of users logging in to the game each time, and the stability of the connection, game operators need to make more precise requirements dismantling and updating under the general "game experience". High-quality technical response.

Audio and video live broadcasts further test the clarity and fluency of live broadcasts. Once used as a single-choice question for video websites, it has also become an option for both fish and bear after the user experience level is upgraded. How to ensure smooth access to audio and video in different geographical areas around the world has also become the key, especially in the case of weak telecommunication infrastructure services such as Southeast Asia, which can still provide a smooth audio-visual experience.

For cross-border e-commerce, financial and other scenarios, timely, stable, and fast data synchronization services are even more needed, which still puts forward requirements for the underlying anti-strike ability of Internet applications.

03 The native Internet has no QoS guarantee

The Internet provides Best-Effort (best-effort) network interconnection services. Its mission is to transmit data as much as possible. Therefore, its priority is connectivity and scalability, but it does not guarantee the complete transmission of data. The QoS quality and priority of users such as delay and reliability are not guaranteed.

The Internet is composed of various regional networks. There is no centralized management and scheduling mechanism. Global network transmission needs to span multiple networks. However, each area is operated and maintained by different ISPs. Different ISPs will have different levels according to the scale and nature of service provision. Different levels of ISPs also have different data routing rules.

ISP interconnection at different levels

Relying on the BGP protocol, direct connection (Peering) and transfer (Transit) between ISPs are more efficient. This organization method guarantees scale and scalability, but at the expense of reducing the availability and quality of end-to-end network communications.

On the one hand, BGP is not designed to detect continuous congestion, packet loss, burst traffic, large delays and other network problems. As long as it can still communicate, it will continue to send along the original path, although the network has been seen from the parameters such as packet loss delay jitter Serious deterioration, the experience of most applications will be terrible, and applications that are sensitive to real-time and quality cannot be used. Assuming bandwidth congestion in the direction from Shanghai Telecom to the US LA, resulting in packet loss as high as 30%, while Shanghai Telecom to Hong Kong has ample bandwidth and no packet loss, the BGP protocol cannot abandon the direct connection and switch to a transfer from the Hong Kong operator to the US LA. Thereby improving quality.

On the other hand, when a path is indeed unavailable, BGP takes a long time to recover. Experiments have shown that 10% of the paths cannot achieve 95% availability, and 35% of the path availability is lower than 4 9s (99.99%), 40% Of path failures took more than 30 minutes to repair, and 5% of path failures took more than 2 hours and 45 minutes to repair.

Therefore, the routing architecture of the Internet backbone network is optimized for relatively simple and high scalability. It has successfully supported the geometric growth of the Internet in the past few decades. The price behind it is that it cannot quickly provide QoS-guaranteed network transmission. . .

At the same time, from the perspective of user network access, multiple access methods such as WiFi, 3G, 4G, and 5G have made the problem of accessing the network more complicated. 3G, 4G, and 5G wireless signals are unstable due to regional influences, and the uplink and downlink bandwidths are limited. WIFI is limited by equipment and suffers from problems such as uneven performance, good and bad signals, and serious interference. At the same time, the high multiplexing ratio of the access network causes significant traffic congestion during peak periods.

When using the Internet to provide Best-Effort (best effort) network interconnection services, depending on the current load situation, you will encounter varying degrees of packet loss, delay and bandwidth limitations. However, the current existence includes audio and video communications, online games, mobile finance, corporate global office, corporate remote collaboration, cross-border e-commerce, cross-network and cross-regional IoT data message synchronization, as well as various overseas applications and overseas users' access to domestic sources. Etc., all require the network transmission to have a well-defined real-time performance and availability. These applications require stronger QoS guarantees.

04 Technical Challenges Behind QoS Guarantee

In disassembling the requirements of different scenarios above, we can summarize some common demands and see what challenges the Internet application QoS guarantee needs to face under the globalization of business.

Challenge 1: Global network infrastructure is uneven, cross-network delay is large, and weak network affects user experience.

Speedtest released the global Internet speed rankings for December 2020. China Mobile has the fourth highest Internet speed in the world, which is three times the global average. The average network speed in parts of India, Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia is only one-tenth that of China, which is equivalent to China's 3G era. Most domestic apps will face common weak network problems when going overseas. For example, bandwidth is limited, congestion during peak hours, and serious packet loss. The end-side protocol optimization and business optimization put forward higher requirements.

The data exchange interface between operators is complicated, which leads to increased delays in cross-operator access. In cross-border connections, international submarine cables have scarce resources, limited cross-regional service bandwidth, and congestion during peak periods. At the same time, routing negotiation between operators relies on artificial configuration, and configuration errors occur from time to time, leading to traffic black holes.

Challenge 2: Distributed deployment, high construction cost for high-quality access across regions.

Based on the construction of cross-regional access on a dedicated line, the cost of a single M is more than 1,000 yuan, and the charging model and expansion method of the dedicated line are also difficult to support the rapid and elastic expansion of the business. Under the high cost of hard infrastructure, better underlying software technology is required to reduce costs. However, the low cost of software brings a large investment of manpower, which requires companies to have more games in business development.

Challenge 3: Limited public cloud coverage and high multi-cloud complexity.

Public cloud channels are often restricted by factors such as network bandwidth and node layout, and cross-border business access still faces many difficulties. Companies going overseas are in different industries and have different business requirements. In addition, the countries and regions going overseas also have great differences in laws and regulations and IT infrastructure construction. The public cloud covers most of the developed countries, while the coverage in remote areas is blank, especially in Africa, South America, and Central Asia.

Most enterprises choose a multi-cloud approach for business deployment, which is bound to increase complexity. Some are cross-regional multiple cloud service providers, some are multiple cloud service providers in the same region, and there are even more complex operator network dedicated line combinations behind them. Complicated cross-network issues for telecom operators and cloud service providers have become a challenge for regional coverage.