By Kathy Gibson, Satnac 2013, Stellenbosch – In the last decade, digital technologies have changed our lives, driving new behaviours. But why is broadband important? And why don’t we just continue to use copper infrastructure? Asks Lu LiangJi, managing principle consultant at Huawei Technologies.
He says that, beyond ICT, our life and work are becoming digitally connected in terms of a digital enterprise, a digital society and digital government.
“Our lives will change in the future – personal and business,” he says.
Once devices become commodities, LiangJi says, we will enter the new era of information explosion, sharing and collaborating anywhere, anytime – and this will drive a big data and big traffic flood. Big data ill drive cloud and big traffic will drive fast networks, he says, both of them driving broadband.
To cope with this new flood, LiangJi says the era of Gigabit bandwidth and the software defined network are coming. The ubiquitous gigabit network will be the freeway for a digital society, while the SDN allows for more intelligence.
Of course, bandwidth demand will increase in this environment. By reducing the last mile distance, higher broadband speeds will be enabled, and more technologies will be deployed to enable this.
Meanwhile more in-depth cellular coverage will offer higher speed broadband services as well as seamless experience for users.
A huge number of new solutions are now available – and in future customers will be looking for more connectivity and better applications.
Building the ubiquitous super pipe associated with other complementary network resources will offer customers a new experience. But service providers need to reconsider their business strategies to take advantage of the new world, LiangJi adds.