Anthony Camilleri

In a market now inundated with data-hungry social media platforms, whether you are an Internet service provider, network wholesaler, or mobile service operator, the industry continues to grapple with the challenge of growing revenue and margins across its broadband consumer base. Finding the right balance between network investments and the average revenue generated per end-user has been difficult for most organisations due to the forever-moving target of data growth and consumption.

We are observing an unprecedented need for speed from end-users globally, with the year 2021 setting data usage records spurred on partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic but predominantly driven by society's insatiable appetite for streaming services. Setting the benchmark for the rest of the world, we saw the average weighted broadband consumption in the North American market surpass 512 GB for the first time, with many network operators now scrambling to keep pace with the growing demand. To complicate matters further, network operators must plan to deliver strategies that will combat the expected tsunami in data utilisation from the next evolution of the internet - the Metaverse!

So, what is the Metaverse, and when will it arrive?

This may surprise some, but the transition to this new world known as the Metaverse has already begun. To back this up, we are already seeing massive investment dollars being piled into initiatives spawning from the "Metaverse," with the likes of Facebook changing its name to Meta as part of its investment into the next digital frontier - The Metaverse! The Metaverse is the next generation of internet and centres around how the user will experience the internet of the future – Web 3.0. It is a concept of delivering a persistent, online, 3D universe that combines multiple different virtual spaces. So advanced are some metaverse industries that people are already calling this transition "the future iteration of the i