The Future of Broadband - views from industry leaders

One of the events that took place at the same venue as the recent World IT Show 2012 was the 8th Korean Communications Conference. The event was attended by a number of world leaders as well as leading figures of companies from the the communication space. We were present for two talks - one by Nokia-Siemens Networks’ CEO, Rajeev Suri and the other by Korea Telecom head, Lee Suk-Chae.

The theme of the convention was simple - to try and look at what the future of telecommunications and broadband infrastructure would be like. First on stage was KT’s Lee Suk-Chae. The emphasis was on the value of the amount of data around the world. He chose to term the data as virtual goods, be they apps, media or software. Data was collected by several research agencies and there were some interesting numbers that were shown off. The value of the virtual goods market, for example, is said to grow to some $160 billion in the next three years. Apps and games are going to account for most of these numbers, while there were new kinds of media that were going to add to this value even more. 3D printing was also going to pick up allowing designers to be able to pass on their product designs to remote 3D printing systems.

Lee Suk-Chae, CEO, KT

High-speed networks were more than just quick access to apps and media over the Internet. The Internet is going to enable a whole bunch of other possibilities as well. New startups are now possible with very basic investment. Another trend that’ll quickly pick up is the ability to work smartly from home. This brings along a lot of benefits as well - employees won’t have to travel long hours from home to work, which means less traffic on the roads, lower expenses and a reduction in pollution. Problems with industries due to geographical distances will also be reduced. Companies can be set-up around the world and different groups of employees can work through the day, thus improving productivity. Lee Suk-Chae also spoke about the mobile traffic in Korea. It’s supposed to be the fastest in the world, in terms of expansion. Mobile traffic is said to increase 10 times by 2015. Data usage in Korea is already the highest in the world, despite its lower population, as compared to India and China. Most of the predictions and reports were sourced from Cisco.

The case of mobile traffic in KT is also very impressive. 3G and LTE are already present in the country, with KT having launched LTE, earlier this year. Data consumption, since January 2009 to March 2012 increased by some 153 times. It’s expected to rise some 1000 times more. This is likely to be driven by the influx of smart devices in the market. 3D content, high definition displays and larger screens are likely to drive the demand for fast data rates on the Internet. The talk is particularly important as Korea always has been the benchmark for a look at the future. The trends seen in Korea today are expected to hit other countries in the near future. 

Rajeev Suri, CEO, Nokia-Siemens Networks

Another important figure to speak at the conference was Nokia-Siemens CEO, Rajeev Suri. Soon after he arrived on stage, he spoke about the sudden acceleration of data demands over the past decade. The first handheld phone appeared in the 70s, but it’s only since 2000 or so that data became an important part of people's lives. 3G, mobile e-commerce are only products of this transition. Some interesting figures were also given by him, which helps put into perspective the amount of media that was uploaded to the Internet everyday. The slide in this presentation spoke about some 90,000 Twitter posts being made per minute and some 60 hours of video uploaded to the Internet per minute. The use of social medium and interactive media is going to drive the future. It’s just not consumers who are using these services, but also companies. For example, some 75 percent of all companies today use Twitter as a medium for marketing. Rajeev also spoke of NSN’s own Liquid Net technology and its ability to scale, depending on the needs of a customer.