For readers who are not hardcore telcoheads, this eBook should give you some insight into what’s going on in telecoms. Because we’ve collectively failed to take control over quality, customers are buying hardware and software devices. “Software-Defined Wide Area Net- working” or “SD-WAN” that “fakes it until telcos make it”. These edge devices and software can bond together different access networks – like fixed and wireless broadband – re-allocate that bonded supply to diverse competing demands, and (some) can route important traffic over private cloud networks instead of the Public Internet. SD-WAN has become very popular in places like branch offices, but the challenge is now the “gig worker”.

1. 1
Mobile SD-WAN
Empowering & connecting Remote Workers in the new Gig Economy
E B O O K
By Martin Geddes

2. 32
For readers who are not hardcore telcoheads, this eBook should give
you some insight into what’s going on in telecoms. Because we’ve
collectively failed to take control over quality, customers are buying
hardware and software devices. “Software-Defined Wide Area Net-
working” or “SD-WAN” that “fakes it until telcos make it”.
These edge devices and software can bond together different ac-
cess networks – like fixed and wireless broadband – re-allocate that
bonded supply to diverse competing demands, and (some) can route
important traffic over private cloud networks instead of the Public In-
ternet. SD-WAN has become very popular in places like branch offices,
but the challenge is now the “gig worker”.
1 OUTSIDE IN ALWAYS WINS“CLOUDULAR”REMOTE WORKING
“91 percent of people who work
from home feel more productive
than when they’re in an office.”
-Forbes
Business travel can result in memorable cultural encounters. I have
a vivid recollection of the early 2000s, when I delivered a work-
shop first in Chicago, and then again in Helsinki. The Americans
were insistently talkative, and the Finns stereotypically taciturn.
Yet despite their comparatively few words, what really stuck in my
mind was a telecoms truism the Nordics taught me:“outside-in al-
ways wins”.
The context at that time was the initial explosion of cellular voice
and data adoption. The whole world still gets its mobility needs
met by building macrocells, whose signal penetrates inside of
each building. We don’t set up radios inside all occupied buildings,
and then try to cover the world from the inside-out. This wasn’t
always obvious, as British investors in the ill-fated Rabbit network
in the early 1990s can attest.

3. 4 5
2 CELLULAR IS NOT THE END GAME OF MOBILITY
As time has passed, the demands for mobility have evolved. This first
generation of mobility was about making a single device usable in
many different places. We are now engaged in a second generation
of mobility, moving from“cellular mobility”of devices to“cloudular
hypermobility”of application services. This demands not only vari-
ability in place, but also in term of activity.
No longer are we taking a desk-based job and making it mobile, as
in the“mobile worker”paradigm. Instead, a single person is likely
working on multiple simultaneous projects for different clients, each
of which may have many tasks. While a video of a field service inci-
dent is uploading for one customer to an Amazon-hosted applica-
tion, you are dealing with a contract negotiation with another via an
Azure UC service.
The“one job for life”long ago turned into a“life of sequential
jobs”, and is now fully inverting into a“life of many concurrent
jobs”. This places new requirements on the ICT service infrastruc-
ture to meet complex and concurrent application demands.
Specifically, the mobile worker needs not only connectivity, but
also suitable performance and a secured identity to access enter-
prise compute and data resources.
Mobile SD-WAN is the new“outside-in”way of meeting these
“cloudular mobility”needs. By dealing with the hardest cases first,
it eventually owns the whole problem space.

4. 6 7
3 IF YOU MUST GAMBLE, BET ON A CERTAINTY
While the need for worker mobility is now obvious, the value of
it is also worth emphasising. Despite many confounding factors
that make definitive analysis hard, remote working appears to
be both more productive and cheaper than office working. For
instance, according to Forbes, “91 percent of people who work
from home feel that they’re more productive than when they’re
in an office”.
This productivity data is confirmed by other sources. The
much-cited Ctrip study — a Chinese travel agency — was cov-
ered by Inc thus: “While Ctrip originally thought the money it
would save in space and furniture--about $1,900 per employee
for the length of the study--would offset a drop in productivity,
at-home worker output wasn’t hampered a bit. … In fact, com-
pared with office counterparts, those working from home made
13.5 percent more calls, quit 50 percent less, and said they were
much happier on the job.”
Data from Owl Labs gives us a more refined picture: such work-
ers are biased towards individual contributor roles in smaller
companies, and are concentrated in sales, product development,
marketing and IT roles. They are faster to hire, and easier to re-
tain. That remote working is critical to competitive success is now
established fact, not futuristic speculation.
Remote working is becoming the default means of deliv-
ering knowledge work, and is having widespread impacts
across sectors and lifestyles. According to The Guardian, 18%
of new UK residential units in 2016 were conversions of offic-
es to homes — a 50% rise in a single year. A new academic
discipline of“virtual leadership”has emerged to study how
best to manage distributed teams using collaboration tools,
and is being taught at management schools.
Whatever solves the problem for remote workers is likely to
be the solution for everyone over time.

5. 8 9
4
In the“gig economy plus plus”world, we no longer just“work
anywhere,”like an out-of-office employee, with“OOO”as new de-
fault. We must also“work on anything”and“for anyone and with
anyone”. We are under continual pressure to increase the number
of tasks and applications we work with, and to deliver against
shorter cycle times. After all, we are all running hard to maintain
our human edge against intelligent automation systems.
Mobility is one way to service work requests sooner and faster. As
we all frustratingly know, cellular mobility isn’t a free lunch. Apart
from the obvious device and service costs, you also need to be
able to cope with loss of signal and consequent dropped voice
calls. This familiar problem mutates into a whole new world of
difficulty as we go from“cellular”to“cloudular”access.
“STOPPED APPS”ARE THE NEW“DROPPED CALLS”
The new IT lifecycle management problems manifest at both an
organisation and individual level. Organizations of all sizes fre-
quently require vendor technicians, contractors and other non-
staff members to carry out work that requires remote privileged
access.
Meanwhile, individuals have to deal with many corporate inter-
faces, and it’s not appropriate to have a locked-down managed
device for each“gig”.
Security domains give a partial answer, shifting perimeter secu-
rity into new VPN models with richer identities and delegated
authority. Virtual desktop (VDI) technology acts as a“mirror”, al-
lowing you only to externally interact with the presentation layer
outside.
This is much like Web did in the 1990s, but demanding one
browser for all apps and contexts, which is a poor fit for this new
model. Companies like Tehama have made great progress in pro-
viding such temporary secured access solutions.
“This is much like Web did in
the 1990s, but demanding
one browser for all apps and
contexts, which is a poor fit
for this new model.”

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5 THE MISSING LINK: MANAGED APPLICATION PERFORMANCE
Secured enterprise access may be a solved technical problem,
but application performance remains the Achilles’heel of remote
work. Not only do we have a greatly increased variability in ap-
plication performance demand, but also in term of broadband
supply.
We now have many different kinds of broadband access technol-
ogies in use, some with dedicated access links (Ethernet or DSL)
and some with shared access (WiFi or LTE). The highest levels of
variability in shared access networks creates the hardest schedul-
ing and flow control protocol problems. This is before we begin to
consider how these are bonded and blended to service the many
different data flows, or how ISPs vary in competence and quality.
There has until now been no easy solution to constructing a
suitable supply to meet the variable demand. Fixed SD-WAN is
by definition not mobile, targeting a specific venue. It is at best
portable, for example letting you relocate the hardware from
your main home to your second holiday home. The alternative is
to just accept“best effort”delivery and the public Internet, with
unmanaged failure.
Users can instead engage in expensive and possibly slow miti-
gation of access quality, like buying better access for home, or
temporarily relocating into a“hot desk”type office. They can also
effectively self-insure against the risk of application failure by
taking on less work, or by offering longer delivery times.
None of these mitigation approaches come for free: hence there
is significant business value in predictable performance and
making bad experiences sufficiently rare, at least compared to
making acceptable experiences even better. This is important:
the reward is in fixing the worst case — which is what the remote
worker faces — and not in improving situations that are already
good enough, but are easier to address.
“Secured enterprise access
may be a solved technical
problem, but application
performance remains the
Achilles’ heel of remote work.”

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PERFECTION IS NOT AVAILABLE; COMPROMISE IS NECESSARY
6
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be facing these problems. After all,
we typically don’t have to worry whether there will be enough
electrical power for our laptop where we work. But broadband
isn’t like that yet.
We don’t have truly engineered performance, and that isn’t going
to be fixed by 5G“slicing”—or anything else in the near future.
Our transport protocols like TCP/IP are 1970s prototypes, and
replacements like RINA are still in the lab.
Even if these existed as products today, they are“best case”and
not“worst case”for the remote worker.
Nonetheless, we can dream: a true on-demand and flexible sup-
ply that meets any need, with a low cycle time to provision it for
“lean”work, and pricing aligned to business value. The order of
failure in overload would be managed to the value of both the
task and customer.
The maximum possible“experience yield”would be squeezed out
of the communications resources on offer.
The pragmatic reality is we have Internet Protocol, with no asso-
ciation awareness or native security domains; TCP, with the worst
possible control span and least possible stability; and no standard
form of demand awareness in networks, but lots of DPI and traffic
management to try to recreate it.
All kinds of fixes and workaround are often applied, but Lusser’s
Law — failure grows with the number of serial components —
dictates that this results in uncontrolled and out-of-order applica-
tion failure modes.
Without something to take control over the experience, we face
a descent into complexity of network operator interaction and
application failure. The benefits of mobile working will be lost
to reversion to legacy methods with long provisioning times, or
foregone to more flexible competitors in an outsourced service
economy.

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7 MOBILE SD-WAN SOLVES THE“EXPERIENCE YIELD”PROBLEM
Fixed SD-WAN is the“inside-out”model: it is focused on the
needs of the place and space, not the transient user or applica-
tion. It is fundamentally not suitable to the“cloudular mobility”
task, in the same way that fixed phone could be made“cordless”,
but no more. Evolution of the broadband gateway can only go so
far.
Mobile SD-WAN is the“outside-in”for“cloudular mobility”. It is
targeted at the problems of the individual, and address the vari-
ability of application flow needs. It starts by coping with overload
cases (e.g. LiveQoS’s MASV service) and work inwards to easier
cases. It is a natural evolution of the enterprise VPN, able to route
traffic to the relevant private cloud over private access.
Furthermore, it is“boxless”in the same way a cell phone is“wire-
less”, using software to scheduling access to a shared resource.
Mobile SD-WAN doesn’t solve the underlying need to get the ac-
cess network engineering right — you still get“dropped calls for
apps”, yet the trade-off of more mobility for lower quality is worth
it in most cases.
Over time the improved engineering of the underlying access
networks will make this less of an issue, similar to the move from
2G to 3G to 4G has done for cellular.
As mobile SD-WAN builds upon existing cloud access networks,
it can add in edge performance assurance as such capabilities
become available.
By locating at the edge device, you are already in the appropriate
context to participate in graceful degradation under load.
In contrast, fixed SD-WAN will effectively be a man-in-the-mid-
dle attack, trying to unpick the flows in the same way ISPs have
attempted and often failed. Only mobile SD-WAN matches the
security domain model that is emerging as the requirement for
remote working.
There is a parallel here to the underestimation of cellular tech-
nology in the early 1990s, where analyst predictions were
all backwards, seeing mobile as a small add-on to a massive
established fixed market.
But it was the other way around: mobile was the new default,
and came to eat the fixed market over time. And for a good
reason: while the history of mobility doesn’t repeat itself,“out-
side-in always wins”does rhyme just right!
“Fixed SD-WAN is the
“inside-out” model: it is
focused on the needs
of the place and space,
not the transient user or
applications.
”

9. 16 17
Contact us today to learn how
you can get started with MASV.
The World Leader in Mobile
SD-WAN/SD-Internet.
www.masvcloud.com
Martin Geddes is an authority on the future of the telecoms industry,
ranging from emerging business models to new network technologies.
He is a futurologist, writer, speaker, consultant, and technologist. Mar-
tin is currently writing a book, The Internet is Just a Prototype, on the
future of distributed computing.
He is formerly Strategy Director at BT’s network division, and Chief An-
alyst and co-founder at Telco 2.0. Martin previously worked on a pio-
neering mobile web project at Sprint, where he was a named inventor
on nine granted patents, and at Oracle as a specialist in high-scalability
databases.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR