There was a lot of excitement in our hallways a year ago when we became the first connectivity company to join Intel’s “Super 7.” This is a group of influential web and cloud companies driving innovation in the industry. Last August, inside of AT&T and in collaboration with Intel, we began a project known as “Super 7+1.”
Last summer, we were working closely with Intel on technologies like future 5G and drones. So bringing them into our software-centric network program was a natural fit. We continue to work together. Recently, we kicked off a 5G fixed wireless trial with Intel to deliver an ultra-fast internet connection and DIRECTV NOW to residential and small and large business locations in Austin, Texas.
All this leads me to today’s news.
This morning, I joined Navin Shenoy, Intel’s executive vice president and general manager of its data center group, in New York to discuss our progress over the last year. Being part of the Super 7+1 gives us early access to new Intel technology.
We’re running production traffic on servers using Intel’s newly announced Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable family. We began using these new processors in March and have already seen a 30% performance improvement over the Intel® Xeon® E5v3 platform. We’ve also seen a 25% reduction in the number of servers needed per cluster, with a larger data throughput, improving our overall TCO.
Early access to new technology lets us meet rising network data demands. On an average business day, AT&T’s network carries 150 petabytes of data traffic. Data traffic on our mobile network has grown 250,000% since 2007. This trajectory shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. In fact, over the next 5 years, we expect to see our mobile data traffic increase 10x. Most traffic will be video. We expect video to be 70-80% of our network traffic by 2020.
We are a data-powered company driven by our AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo vision. And our Super 7+1 relationship with Intel lets us build, fine-tune and accelerate time to market with our software-centric, cloudified solutions, like AT&T’s FlexWare.
AT&T is developing reference architectures and designs that will set industry standards, drive innovation and, ultimately, deliver significant benefits to our customers faster.
An example of this is ONAP. Driven by The Linux Foundation, ONAP is quickly becoming the global standard for deploying and operating a virtualized network. Service providers representing 55% of global wireless subscribers have officially committed to the platform. There are many more in the pipeline.
This is just the beginning. Software-defined services using the cloud and future 5G will change how we all live, work and play.
Congratulations to Intel on its Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable family announcement today. And a big thank you to Andre Fuetsch, Chris Rice and the entire AT&T Technology & Operations team for the fantastic progress in transforming our network, opening the network ecosystem and collaborating with like-minded companies like Intel.
John Donovan - Chief Strategy Officer and Group President – AT&T Technology and Operations
