Too Much Broadband. Or is it?

Tom Wilson
CEO & Executive Managing Director
SAMENA Telecommunication Council

The global telecommunications environment, as a whole, has been in quite a bit of a fix over the last few years. For the most part, the industry worked on an economic and gradual growth basis for nearly two decades, where the application of services was applied to a fairly linear network topology, that being thestandard legacy TDMA network. The edge application services were developed on a hybrid analog – digital platform and thus transformed to adapt to thestandardized, and reliable (read SDH), electronic DS-1 network interface, which interconnected with other interface points in the network.
Then the Internet came, with the new kid entrepreneur youngsters on the brick and mortar allies, the IP addressed URL based NGN networks; really hitting its initial crescendo in the late nineties then hitting a huge investment crash in the Spring of 2003, due to a serious lack of understanding that consumers don’t buy technology, they buy applications of technology. This, effectively, signaled to the networks that the grand old dame, the old legacy switched 64k (56k for a long time in the US) network, was supposedly here to stay.
The industry realized late that selling technology to end-users where the knowledge of the use of the technology practically took a degree to understand. Consumers do not care how they access their email or the Internet, or how their on-line orders work. They only care that their applications are secure, safe and reliable. The brick and mortar (legacy) guys danced and pointed fingers andlaughed at the upstarts.
At the same time, the fiber networks had expanded and the network operators were told one day by investors and financial institutions that they had too muchfiber in the ground! Imagine that. The values of the network transport systems were greatly depreciated, for the market at that time firmly believed there was absolutely no way anyone could fill those pipes—those high capacity (comparatively speaking) conduits of light interconnecting metro areas to others, and in many cases, bringing entire continents in connection. There was just too much in the ground, sea and who knows where else. Funny, how the invention of Mosaic, leading to the creation of the World Wide Web would change that.
Not for long did the legacy networks gloat. Soon, they began to see the future unrolling before their eyes. Faster, younger and more prescient market-attuned participants would soon see growth on their network—those that had the ability to upload instruction sets and consumer demands of the service providers and download video and other data content, make streaming of heavy media content such as YouTube possible, do Google searches, and not to mention what would happen soon after — high definition digital movie downloading.
Then, about ten years later or so, smartphones assaulted the world. Nokia led forsome time with its Communicator series handset in Europe and the Middle East, and other handsets, such as the Sony Ericsson 901 also began to separate the capacity needs from the feature phone network requirements. Once any kind of edge networking appeared on the horizon of the operators (let alone any other advanced technology network infrastructure such as UMTS, HSDPA, etc), the realization came: the data demand on networks evolved and will never be the same again. Finally, the great game changer of all, the dean of smartphones, as far as being THE benchmark, the Apple iphone first series came out, with a limited network speed, but loaded with an OS that would make the OS offerings from Symbian and Microsoft look in comparison as a model T ford to an Audi TT convertible.
As the evolution of handsets continually proceeds through its increments of growth, almost at Moore’s Law type of advances, the networks are pushed, driven and cajoled into performing faster, quicker, not to mention, sending the latest stock report or the most recent new hot social media or street uprising YouTube clip without fail, and, I may add, without delay. Perfection has to be executed for all this to happen flawlessly, withstanding the data bombardment that networks are increasingly becoming the target of. Take this as an example: Actual sequences of network (carrier unnamed) outages in New York City and other large urban markets occurred due to the rollout of the Apple 3G, then the Apple 3GS, and then the Apple 4G, and from which use, the data bombardment that followed. It all severely tested the nerves and the tensile strengths of the operator in some of the US’s busiest metropolises.
Mobile networks were just networks, just as their fixed counterparts, and there are consumer needs for both. However, mobile operators have the glitz and the appeal of the consumer, due to the new age and the high-tech gadgetry that seemingly allows a user to do things that were only imaginable just five years ago. But now the Internet has come of age. Just a few days ago, we heard that the last batch of URL Internet addresses had been distributed and there, basically, are no more to give out! The advent of IPV6 is clearly going to happen. What caused this, the incessant demand for broadband and what is interesting is that most governments all around the world are demanding greater broadband expansion through public private partnerships as in Australia, or via direct subsidization such as the capital stimulus that was or will be paid out by the Obama led congress in the US.
To no surprise, in the Middle East and African regions, adoption of mobile broadband services is among key contributors of subscriber net additions. Africa would contribute substantially to an anticipated mobile broadband boom in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, which is expected to be worth around US$6 billion thisyear. Based on industry projections by the likes of Delta Analytics, Value Partners and Informa, there are reasons to believe that nearly 70{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} of the broadband services in the Middle East and, particularly, in Africa could be deliveredover wireless networks by 2011. Furthermore, the Middle Eastern mobile broadband market is expected to reach 50 million subscribers by 2013 increasing from seven million in 2008 as technologies such as UNTS, HSDA and others allowing for 3.5G (again the nasty not so accurate measurement term) gain popularity this year. In the SAMENA region, mobile broadband is a vital part of the next technology wave that will drive growth and improve enterprise business efficiency productivity. According to a recent research report by Informa, the future growth of broadband in Africa and the Middle East will be driven by mobile broadband, with the subscriber total increasing at a CAGR of 34{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} to reach around 38 million by 2014, slightly faster than the global average.
Until a few years ago, broadband was something that every one talked about but no one really, truly knew or understood how seriously the subject was to be approached. The desire and the ability to watch a football match on a smartphone; the ability to play internet video games; do social networking; and everything else that pounds the network with bandwidth and QoS requirements, has been surging and has become so great that even the mobile companies in some country markets such as North America are building localized WiFi networks and are encouraging their users to use these WIFI networks, in some cases, for free, just to not add further stress to already taxed data networks. What’s driving all this is network compression (resulting in congestion that is gaining density on an almost daily basis), which sacrifices other service sets and requirements on the network.
Make no mistake, however. The future has only begun to crystallize (at least in this current metastasizing occurrence) the strong demand for broadband capacity is stillgrowing on a non-linear basis. LTE is still largely in the trial phase and, as this is only beginning to hit the network infrastructure market, let alone national deployment, the discussion of Advanced LTE is already upon us. Theadvent of EVDO based CDMA network topology along with WiMAX applications also are currently in place and continued demand for them remains high.
The simplicity of use for some operating systems on handsets such as Android, Apple and the newest edition of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 have again further pushed the envelope. The current growth of both mobile broadband and fixed broadband networks are driven by the end users ability to adapt to what’s available via his or her laptop in the home of the office and or via their handsets. The use and theapplication of either is what will set the barometer of success. That is, the packaging, the amount of entertainment and the level of portability to a certain degree, together, will provide the impetus for further growth, some of which is being experienced currently, for example, in the markets of Egypt,Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Mobile devices have inherent limitations, which, among other things, include imperfect operating systems that work against the consumer experience, along with size of screens and in some cases, limited key pad size for data entry, along with the sometimes spotty network coverage, low battery reservoirs or constant switching between the 2G and 3G network apparatus on the handset. On the other hand, fixed broadband networks tend to be steady, reliable and consistent bandwidths provide for a steady and no-surprises environments. There are inherent limitations with fixed broadband as well, with the main being portability and applications. However, the latter is already being countered. Apple has recently opened up its application store on its iTunes program (sure to be followed by others), which should open up the fun factor for fixed or nomadic broadband users.
Network operators are rapidly evolving toward next-generation network designs, to be able to support multimedia applications. The growth of optical networking technologies such as GPON, GEPON can be attributed to high demand for multimedia services such as data, and video, games, and other bandwidth hungry applications. Many markets in the SAMENA region now have the supporting optical infrastructure, i.e., FTTH, GPON andGEPON to support the delivery of high-speed broadband network services directly to the home. This along with the potential of other network technologies for mobile networks such as femto cells crossing the horizon will extend the access to broadband services. These technologies are allowing for the materialization of new revenue streams, which are progressively being driven by content delivery, ranging from streaming video to other data intensive content media.
End users rarely sit back and think, how does this work, as far as how they gain access to the broadband experience. They just expect the system to work.  All the abilities to get online are linked together by the operators and service providers, who must deal with infrastructure development and maintenance, management of the consumer’s experience using the network, CAPEX, OPEX, regulatory pressures and complexities, spectrum management and an assortment of other professional activities that truly must test the capabilities of many a CEO and their teams. And all are related to the broadband experience.
Broadband is a subject area, with its own semantic and operational characteristics, that SAMENA is largely developing much of its efforts in support of. SAMENA is mindful of the fact, and in absolute support of the predictions abound, that broadband is a necessity and shall always remain so. At the time being, broadband is going through a sort of “speciation” and, as such, is requiring that operators and regulators address key issues, which include but are not limited to fiber network development. Without making it easier for investors to contribute promptly to the broadband growth, and without giving fiber networks the dueattention and importance and creating an enabling environment for fiber networks to promptly grow and be “visible” to the end-user, the evolutionary process would only face unnecessary, or dead-end delays. By now, everyone is talking about fiber networks (either as delivery to the home, or as back bone or as GSM back haul) knows and really understands how seriously this subject should be approached. We just have to ensure we approach it promptly, with fiber equity in mind.
I was attending the MWC held by GSMA in Barcelona, and was in a conversation with Dr. H. Toure, Secretary General of the ITU, amongst others just this last Tuesday afternoon, where it was discussed how the advent of broadband was genuinely here to stay. There was much to like about the growth of broadband but there also were problems with the current business models that operators use. One of the ideas was what if actual data could be charged on an individual message type basis. What if the networks could charge for emails, where a charge for spam mail, if only at one half a tenth of a penny, would change the experience of email users world wide, but also may reduce congestion on thenetworks. There is technology now available that can “see” what kind of data was on the data stream and if this can be identified, would that not be a cool thing, to see the “spammers” be charged for unwanted transmittals, therefore much spam maybe disappearing forever.
This as we see it, the development of Broadband will continue to eviscerate its former limitations on what seems at a pace that is surely amazing and also ultra expensive. There will be a time in the not too far distant future that the term 3G and even 4G will seem so old school and of “dinosaur” like capabilities. Then as now, the industry will be wondering what will be the next step. I would not think that 3D image hologram views of broadcast/cable/mobile television or webcam videoconferences would not be a part of that time and space. Scotty, please beam me up! As I have said before, change is opportunity and the telecom (ICT) industry is always changing.