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Broadband Access
Linares looks to the converged future
Keynote provides a view of industry integration
by Kendrick Struthers-Watson
The Wednesday keynote at Broadband World Forum in Brussels was given by Julio Linares, COO, Telefonica S.A., a highly respected heavyweight with vast experience and knowledge in the telecommunications industry.
Linares started out by sharing his vision on how the integration of the industry would help the connected world.
“I believe our industry has contributed to the connected world by helping people to connect to others and things that matter to them. This contribution has many facets, but I’d like to highlight just three of them: High investment; the decline of prices; and the capability to handle large volume.”
He highlighted how some 14 percent of industry revenue went back into investment, which is significantly high, to benefit the services on offer and this resulted in shorter technology life cycles whilst the coverage of services was increasing disproportionately.
“At the same time as making these investments in the networks, we are doing something very important which is not always recognized or identified in our industry. We are improving productivity. In the last five years, our industry increased productivity in such a way that it is 100 percentage points ahead of any other industry sector. If our industry prices are compared to the Retail Price Index (RPI) in Europe, there are 21 percentage points of difference and the consumers have had that benefit. You may think that this has taken place because the industry moved from monopoly to a competitive environment, but when you see the service deployed in a competitive environment, like mobile services and broadband, you would see that prices have gone down over the last five year, or around 40 percent.”
He continued, “Through this massive investment and growth in customer update and usage, the result is we now have to manage the enormous volume of data, large volumes of accesses, producing high volumes of information carried throughout the networks and the information that needed to be stored.”
Linares went on to explain how networks have had to change to cope with the additional demands made through the technological advances they introduced on the march towards an all IP-based set of services to provide customers with the experience they demanded. These advances included Facebook, where the open application allows users to improve the application to help others to use it, thereby increasing the number of users. Next is micro-blogging, which helps social networking and helps folks to ask, ‘what do you do now?’
Then there are such convergent services such as the UK’s BBC iPlayer, a system that can record the previous, or next seven days’ TV programs. Within service launch, in the first 20 days, more than one million BBC television programs had been downloaded, equal to more than 250,000 every 24 hours.
In predicting that networks’ digital content would multiply by a factor of 10 over the next five years to take the volumes into Zetabytes (15,000 million bytes), Linares had concerns over how networks could cope with such traffic in this new ‘Zetbyte era’ when broadband would have dynamic bandwidth growth, and mobiles would have equally good coverage inside and out. He believed that technology was not a constraint and that optical fiber was the important factor in both network advancement and investment.
“In the new Zetabyte era we will need new networks that need four main features: broadband – with dynamic bandwidth for the new services required by customers; mobility; storage capacity and backup of very large content; large capacity – in order to handle all types of traffic and data throughout the network. To build a broadband fixed network in Europe will cost €250 million, equal to €50 million per annum over the next 20 years for the new infrastructure. This will need both public and private effort,” he said.
There are four main areas to success, Linares continued: build the infrastructure; build the new services with other partners and companies; stimulate demand by providing the correct types of services to meet customer requirements; cooperation and open models for rapid deployment.
“Our industry has the opportunity and duty to contribute to the economic growth in the creation of the new networks of the future."
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