Yevgeny Morozov: Metaverses are an investment asset
Speaking about the potential for replacing Western cloud services, Yevgeny Morozov pointed out that there was a current trend towards increasing availability of cloud services from Chinese providers in Russia.
“As an internet exchange point, we are recording increasingly more connections to new Chinese cloud projects. We are about to see competition between Russian and Chinese cloud services, which should have a positive impact on the market and Russian users who will be able to choose which services best suit their needs,” said the MSK-IX Commercial Director.
Yevgeny Morozov also commented on the prospects for creating metaverses and their potential impact on telecom businesses. He clarified that by ‘metaverse’ he means VR technology that requires a tremendous amount of computational resources. A metaverse is a virtual world where users can live, communicate, play and interact on various matters. This kind of technology is only possible in sci-fi movies at this point but technological development is bringing the market closer to the point where its participants can actually make these projects a reality.
Yevgeny Morozov also noted that metaverses will attract new clients to the industry of data centers, internet exchange points and telecom providers and they will consume significantly more resources and traffic than ever before. These projects will engage adults, children and businesses. This is our virtual future where we will be able to play, interact and develop lifestyle and business projects.
As concerns technological requirements for metaverse infrastructure, experts primarily speak about the importance of extensive 5G coverage as the speed of internet connection and bandwidth will be essential. Other efforts include building new data centers with a significantly larger number of racks for telecom equipment. It is estimated that the budget for this kind of project may start at 1 billion euros.
“I have not yet heard about any metaverse projects in Russia. So this niche is completely open and should be explored further. Metaverses are a good investment asset. Most likely, these virtual planets will be local due to language and cultural limitations. But we can expect that the pioneers who create the most fascinating projects will get the first billion users,” said Yevgeny Morozov.
