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Broadband World Forum looks at the future

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A wide range of technologies will have - and are already having – a marked effect on broadband, operators and vendors need to be prepared. Operators are facing the challenge of meeting consumers’ demand for increased speed, lower costs and greater efficiency, as well as supporting the European Commission's ambitions to turn Europe into a Gigabit Society by 2025.

While making vast investments, companies need to think about their return on investment as well as increasing regulatory pressures.

Telco’s need to deploy next-generation broadband networks, but often don’t know what to focus on first. To help answer that question, Broadband World Forum produced the report: Predicting the Future with 2020 vision, which shares the future vision of executives from Google, Orange, Microsoft, Telefonica and a host of other leading firms. A sneak peek at some of the insights from the report…

  • 5G, AI, Cloud and the IoT are all coming to maturity at the same time, resulting in a new wave of computing, expected to unleash what the GSMA characterises as the era of Intelligent Connectivity.
  • The capabilities of next-gen broadband networks, including latency free streaming 4k, and even 8k, video will hasten convergence of OTT and broadcasting technologies. Complete convergence, and the true economic value of the transition to broadband, will be captured when legacy networks such as satellite and terrestrial broadcasting can be turned off.
  • For current applications as well as computing-intensive future media experiences in VR/AR edge computing moves the heavy lifting to the cloud, reducing workload and power use on mobile devices while providing a superior end user experience. Edge compute will also enable network slicing in which the features and performance of the network will adapt per session to the service provisioned.

Telcos will increasingly position their networks as ‘enabling platforms’ for applications, but the question remains exactly who, if it’s not the telco, will generate the significant new revenues from riding on top. The best route to ROI is to maximise value to the user that is enabled by this technology, and the best way of doing that is to open the platform to the innovation of a third party ecosystem.