TOPICS INCLUDE:
• Economic, market and technology trends and predictions
• Infrastructure developments
• Mobility and wireless evolution
• Copper, fiber, satellite, radio futures
• Disruptive technologies, networks & services
• Commercial and social implications
CONFERENCE OVERVIEW
Our ability to produce and distribute raw bandwidth and services is growing exponentially along with the technology options at our disposal. Be it copper, fiber, radio or satellite, we have a growing set of possibilities for deployment in the local, national, and international loop. But these developments are quickly outpacing the time to deploy them and leading to a crisis of competition.
With fixed networks, we see a growing and expensive confusion with old companies providing IP-based services transmitted over ATM. Newer companies are going for IP over DWDM, a far leaner provision. In the local loop, ADSL was heralded as the future and is now seen to be a fundamentally flawed – providing far too little bandwidth over far too short a distance in a world that is not asymmetric. At the same time, billions of dollars have been wasted on 3G licenses instead of being invested in fiber for the local loop.
WAP and 3G increasingly look to be sharing the same fate as ISDN, and will most likely be taken out by 2.5G, GPRS and DoCoMo. All the LEO schemes have either failed outright or have significantly undershot their original performance and commercial targets. In contrast, GSM dominates the mobile networks of the planet, SMS has become the principal mode, and parasitic, or ad-hoc, networks look set to do real damage in the local loop of the Third and First Worlds.
So what happens next? When and where will the shake out be? What are the implications for individual nations and companies?