Kathy Gibson reports from SATNAC 2014 – South Africa’s vision is to connect all people, schools and clinics – with many of the first deliverables due as soon as 2015.

Mikko Lavanti, chief customer officer at Coriant, points out that the challenges to achieving these goals include affordability and availability.

“It’s not just about access to networks but also about capacity. It is also about readiness and there needs to be a regulatory and policy environment, with investment, skills and incentives.”

Current networks are a mixture of fixed – whether copper or fibre – and wireless technologies. “As a user, I want to be connected wherever I go; I don’t care what it is and I want it to be seamless,” Lavanti says.

Among the enablers are the undersea cables – although it is still cheaper sometimes to transport data via Europe than Africa to Africa – and a fibre network throughout Africa.

In terms of access, mobile continues to be the most important way of getting on to the Internet in Africa, with smartphones set to reach 47% penetration by 2017.

Key drivers in the African context, says Lavanti, are: mobile devices, cloud services, social technologies, big data.

“We have moved away from a static voice analogue network to the current SDG/SONET network and are now moving to the converged network. The cheaper cost per bit requirement is driving us to reconsider how we build our networks. You need to build from the existing installed base.”

The software-defined network (SDN) is at the SDN is at the centre of new developments, with the convergence of the IP/optical network and future[proof scalability important for development going forward.

“SDN will be important to reduce network complexity and ensure IP and optical layers work together,” Lavanti says. “Often SDN is seen as a marketing term, but it is a concrete thing today and more into the future.”

Broadband can drive societal change in a virtuous circle that includes technology as one of the building blocks for transformation.

Daniel Jaeger, vice-president at Alcatel-Lucent, believes the industry needs to go beyond building good networks.

Although there is a challenge to providing access in the world’s leading cities, there are far more difficult challenges in providing access to rural African villages, he says.

“Connectivity is he first challenge,” Jaeger says. The country’s toolkit that it could use to address the challenge includes solutions based on copper, fibre, LTE and small cells.

“A lot of the challenge is to find the right solution in a creative way.”

But the network is not enough, Jaeger stresses, although it needs to be the centrepiece. Surrounding it should be an eco-system with various stakeholders working together.

The different elements are content and applications, devices, operator behaviour, end user dynamics and an enabling regulatory environment.

“All of these factors play a strong role in getting the eco-system going,” Jaeger says.

But it is important to quantify the impact of the eco-system, he adds.

A GDP increase is one way, but there are more tangible measures. Education and healthcare have been measured in East Africa, says Jaeger, and an eco-system driving change has been shown to increase student enrolment by 2,9% and life expectancy by 2,3%.

The ICT industry has changed its role from a supporting system to a growth engine, says Daniel Tang, chief technology officer: fixed network business unit at Huawei.
“In the last decade or so we have seen the likes of Amazon and Alibaba bringing new ways of doing business to the world.”

Alibaba, for example, has created 80-millon jobs either directly or indirectly through supporting functions.

The next step for these companies, Tang points out, is that these companies start to offer new digital services like cloud computing, thus opening up new industries and opportunities.
“They are defining the business to create value.”

In fact, the ICT industry could be said to be creating a new industrial revolution, says Tang. While ICT itself is changing with network transformation and convergence, intelligence is reshaping other industries, while digitalisation and the Internet are working together to make all industries smarter.

“In the telecommunications world we are already seeing the software-defined telecommunications, where everything can be defined through software. This will significantly change the telecommunications industry itself.

“In other industries we now have the ability to fin synergies between intelligence and physical world.”

The new world is not just about connecting people to people, but connecting people with things and things with things. “There are unlimited opportunities if we build a connected world.”

Tang believes the growth momentum will continue as connectivity and usage grows

“Broadband is the foundation of information industry innovations,” he says. “So what’s next?”

He believes 4K television will take off soon, as will cloud computing – particularly in emerging markets – along with telepresence and telemedicine.

“We see that a 10% rise in broadband penetration will lead to a 1,38% increase in GDP.”

However broadband investment is challenging, Tang says. It requires huge investment so operators will tend to pursue profitability in high-value areas.

“So we need a new regulatory framework or optimisation of the existing framework to incentivise investment and encourage competition,” says Tang. “So broadband needs a national policy to protect and encourage investment.”