BuddeBlog

The viral aspects of Wi-Fi are very compelling. Hotspots are spreading like wildfire and I can clearly see the development of a collective system that could provide a unified broadband network. At present there is a hot market for Wi-Fi mesh technologies, which are used for metropolitan area Wi-Fi hot zones, council networks, campus deployment and corporate networks. Watch out here also for the incumbents, as they can strike back with their incumbent networks at lower prices and higher bandwidth.

From late-2005 onwards WiMAX will position itself as a natural middleman technology between public mobile networks and Wi-Fi hot spots. The longer it takes for incumbents to roll out true broadband networks (10MB/s-plus) the more chance wireless broadband has of securing a position in this market. In the end it will depend on whether the technology case and the business case for WiMAX will stand up against alternative offerings from fixed and mobile systems. There is a good chance that WiMax will challenge the 3G services towards the end of this decade.

Duration: 13 minutes

DownLoad: Wireless Broadband (mp3 - 5.7MB)

For Further information see: Global Wireless Broadband reports

Next Generations Networks (NGN) are huge wide area networks (WANs) that are able to support voice, video and data services over a single intelligent Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure. It will become much easier for third parties to develop and link services to this infrastructure, as infrastructure and services will be totally separate from each other, which will allow for literally millions of new services to be offered by hundreds of thousand soft service providers. These networks already exist in the corporate or local area network (LAN) environment and will start reaching mass markets within the next 5 to 10 years. Think of NGNs as a smart, reliable Internet that can support any Communications, Content, Commerce or Control service that you may require - from any device, anywhere, anytime.

It will be built upon a foundation of High Availability with Multiple QoS levels, the ability to support Multicast and will enable the virtualisation of services and resources across the network. Over time, it will increasingly become application aware.

It will be a totally IP based infrastructure which means standardised, cheap and open access. IP addressing will bring in not just people and computers to the network but also cars, fridges, every single power point in the house and so on.

A lot of attention is currently given to VoIP, but voice will simply be one of the millions of applications on this network, voice as such which will hardly register on these multi tera bit networks. However, VoIP offers us a glimpse of the future as it will trigger the initial NGN deployments by leveraging standardisation and cheap, open access to drive competition. VoIP will then come to full fruition in triple play business models that will be marketed over the broadband networks; bundling voice, high-speed Internet and video services such as broadband TV. 

Duration: 16 minutes

Download: Next Generation Networks (NGN), IP & VoIP (mp3 - 6.6MB)

For further information see:

Global - Telecoms & IT (incl. IP & VoIP)
Technology Reports

With little competition dynamics available in the Australian market there has not been a big push for fibre-based network. Ultimately these networks are going to replace the current copper-based and HFC-based telephone and cable TV networks. These upgrades will take 10-15 years to complete. The first large-scale projects will be implemented between 2005 and 2008. Telstra’s announcement of a careful start has certainly created renewed interest in this development. Was Telstra pushed by developments such as Bright’s FttH pilot in Perth and the deployment of FttH by councils in new developments in Victoria? Also utilities are pushing fibre deeper and deeper into the market.

Japan already has already over 1 million FttH users and US telcos have launched a U$75 billion push into this market. Interesting developments are also happening in the Netherlands, Sweden and Iceland.

Duration: 17 minutes 

Download: Fibre-to-the-Home (FttH)  (mp3 - 6.9MB)

For further information see:

Global Broadband reports
Technology Reports