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such systems. At a national level,
smart technology policies will need
governmental oversight teamed with
private sector efforts to stimulate
broadband development to do this.
Nonnecke takes healthcare as
another example driving connectivity
if not massive data flow. “Health-
care is going to be a huge driver for
network deployments nationally and
internationally,” she predicts, arguing
the alternative
is unsustain-
able demand on
the system with
“catastrophic”
consequences.
She ticks
off the upcom-
ing factors: “By
2050, 25 percent
of the world’s
population are going to be over 60
years old. Around 80 percent of
these populations are going to live
in low and middle income countries
… increased chronic disease will
mean greater healthcare demand.”
She continues: “[This] is going to
tax hospitals at a level we have
never seen before,” she predicts.
Avoiding and mitigating the pres-
sures means, she says, early
remote monitoring and then con-
tinuous monitoring where chronic
disease is concerned. It will require
a formidable, but justifiable, invest-
ment. “There is certainly a [finan-
cial] incentive to monitor early and
frequently through remote systems,”
she argues.
Balancing the
video equation
Meanwhile, the industry in its
current burgeoning growth must
still wrestle with another equation:
video. For GCX’s Barney, “video
[now] dwarfs everything else [in
terms of traffic usage].” Here, Bar-
ney argues, what happens depends
on how ubiquitous this current video
trajectory becomes; the equation is
then between demand, investment
and return. “It is very expensive to
transport video all over the world,
and players may not be able to
cover the investment costs.”
In an era where many consumers
already enjoy real-time, full-motion
video capability on their devices,
pressures are building, he indicates,
particularly for wireless operators
because of the spectrum consumed.
He argues more industry disruption
is inevitable, but the disruption will in
turn enable more innovation.
Even on present trends without
standout new demand, major secu-
lar changes are occurring in various
parts of the ICT value chain, and
the future ecosystem may look very
different. APTelecom’s Handa says,
“Beyond 2020, the current buyers
of capacity (carriers), will have less
requirement to purchase capac-
ity for traditional purposes such as
IP transit, as the largest content
providers continue to proliferate
caches within region and, in most
cases, within each country.” He
continues: “APTelecom believe that
a large portion of
this diminished
requirement will
be replaced by
‘tier 2’ content
providers look-
ing to build
out their own
regional/global
networks.”
Content providers have been
making themselves felt, says Beck-
ert of TeleGeography.
“Content providers are the pri-
mary drivers of capacity demand on
key international routes, accounting
for over 70 percent of used trans-
Atlantic bandwidth, and nearly 60
percent of used trans-Pacific and
intra-Asian submarine cable capac-
ity,” he points out. Content provid-
ers are seeking to push content
(and cloud service instances) ever
closer to end users in order to im-
prove performance, and sometimes
due to regulatory requirements.
With respect to the turning point in
the market, TeleGeography projects
that in 2017, content providers’
networks will account for just more
than 50 percent of total used inter-
national submarine cable capacity.
Meanwhile, newer approaches
including edge architectures might
be increasingly attractive, par-
ticularly in non-critical applications
where large data transfers are
required. Eric Klinker, CEO and co-
founder of Resilio, a company spun
out of BitTorrent in 2016, suggests,
“As computing becomes cheap and
ubiquitous, systems at the edge of
the network will become increasing-
ly pervasive and capable, promising
to unlock vast potential in almost
every industry.
“The edge is a world defined
by vast computing scale and very
large data currently tethered to
unreliable and low capacity net-
works,” he continues.
“The market opportunity ahead
is to bridge that gap with software
now and infra-
structure over
time to deliver
game changing
capabilities at
the edge,” says
Klinker. In this
view, he says,
software is the
better answer
to deliver more over the existing
networks with a lower capex for
the telcos and a faster time to mar-
ket to capture opportunities at the
edge today.
o
Recognized as PTC, we are the
global non-profit membership orga-
nization promoting the advancement
of information and communication
technologies (ICT) in the Pacific
Rim, the most dynamic geography
of the world, spanning more than
40 nations. PTC is at the nexus of
two of the most important trends on
the senior leadership agenda today:
the rise of the networked digital so-
ciety and the exponential economic
growth in Asia and beyond. Learn
more at
ptc.org.
International Agents
Dr Brandie
Nonnecke
Stephan Beckert
Eric Klinker
Channel
Vision
|
May - June, 2017
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