Telecom Trends

Nortel CTO John Roese is just getting the hang of blogging and he is providing some interesting insights. I suspect we'll be enjoying more frequent and shorter postings over time, but I find his blog is worth the investment of time to read.

In his latest post, he introduces part one of a series on mega-trends:

a mega-trend in my mind is an unstoppable force of change that causes us to rethink the way we do telecom. Past examples include open source, corporate LANs, home networking, security threats, etc. Each of these caused disruption and reaction from the technical community and each resulted in a new communications paradigm.

The three mega-trends that I view as significant and contemporaneous today are: hyper-connectivity, communications-enabled applications/frameworks, and “true” broadband services.

He defines hyper-connectivity, the theme of the first posting in the series, as a state in which the number of network connections exceeds the number of humans using it. In other words, virtually everyone in the demographic of my blog readers. Count your network connections for human use (voice, data, mobile, TV, etc.) and then add in machine-machine connectivity (meter-reading, automotive diagnostics, etc.).

John's assertion is that this trend and its inevitability have not been factored into much of the technology and architectures in use today to build networks. Far reaching impications. Do operators adequately understand the capital requirements to adapt their networks? Will there be adequate revenues associated with the increased connectivity to justify the capital or will this be blended increased demand at the edge captured in net neutrality covenants?

What are the business models to enable network operators to accommodate hyperconnectivity?

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