While the awareness and traction of the metaverse appears slow moving, engagement is clearly on the rise. Tech industries like telecom are not shying away from it, and the coming year may prove to be a telling one, according to Ciena CIO Craig Williams.

“The network is really the foundation. And if you can get the foundation built, everything else can go on top of it – the potential is limitless,” Williams told SDxCentral. “I'm not hearing like I used to that capacity is the issue in terms of technology. It's just a matter of applying it.”

Williams feels that the right enterprise use cases legitimizing the technology will catalyze its mainstream adoption.

“But I think you've got to get ready because this will be a proving year. And then before you know it, it's mainstream – just like Zoom was or cloud is,” he continued.

Williams has seen network shifts that have laid critical pavement for the metaverse to become a reality.

“If you look back three years ago, for most companies, they're either point-to-point or they might be on MPLS – more of a hub and spokes – or maybe they've gone to SD-WAN, which gave you the ability to really monitor your traffic and be actively as engaged as you would on a local area network,” Williams explained.

“But the wide area network was always left to the telcos to operate, and SD-WAN gave us the ability to go that extra mile and now go, alright, so I don't have to involve a telco – I don’t have to create a ticket … SD-WAN gave us the ability to take action," Williams said.

Williams noted companies also realized they didn’t need data centers anymore and the movement to the cloud was clear, “so that places the edge into the conversation.”

With the accelerated move to online work, Williams feels there is a new strategy placed before companies on how to adopt and manage all of these pieces to the shifting network.

“If you start talking about the problem, things like 5G become a medium because we really don't talk about SD-WAN or MPLS. It's just the medium by which you get your data,” he explained. “So I do see that the network will start to become more of the foundation for all of this going forward. It's just a matter of time.”

How different companies get involved in the space “to make it real” will be the fundamental next step.

“I think what will be interesting to see is what companies like [Amazon Web Services], Google, Microsoft, what they do – versus the telcos. And I'm sure they're gonna have to partner because you still have local-loop challenges if they don't have fiber. But those partnerships might become stronger, because they do need each other.”

Williams referenced his own experience at Ciena working with HoloLens – a mixed reality headset from Microsoft – to coordinate with a manufacturing site during the pandemic.

“We still needed to walk up and down the floor," Williams said. "So we equipped them with [HoloLens] gear and we were able to show them what I'm seeing, what you're seeing, point to that and, you know, bust it open a little bit and ask: Why isn't that just the way we work today?”

These type of cases haven’t “quite hit mainstream adoption,” Williams said, “but it's a no-brainer if someone can turn it into a service.”

As the metaverse gains traction in cases like these, Williams believes “we will start to see 5G have more importance and maybe more stickiness.”

“It's just a small pivot into the enterprise. The great thing is: the technology works. We just need more use cases to solve for,” he explained.