“We have reached the deployment phase,” declared Ericsson’s Chief Strategist, SVP Douglas Gilstrap, on Tuesday at the firm’s Innovation Forum in Silicon Valley.
Speaking at the Stanford University Faculty Club, Gilstrap said we had entered a “very important inflection point,” where a new mindset was taking hold and where “our relationship with technology is changing and in turn changing the relationships we have with work, business, and society.”
Indeed today, said Gilstrap, the very foundation was being laid to build exciting new models of working and living.
The Networked Society, posited Gilstrap, would only truly be achieved once everything that could benefit from a connection will have one.
“In the last 20 years, we’ve created a footprint for mobile broadband. Early on we communicated primarily from place to place, home-to-home with wireline,” he said. “Then in the last 20 plus years we moved to person-to-person telecoms with mobile devices and going forward we will communicate from things-to-things in the form of surveillance, logistics, health monitoring, and enterprise applications. Anything that can benefit from being connected will be connected,” he promised.
“We see three forces that are rapidly shaping the fundamental digital infrastructure in our world. It is this combination that will utilize innovation to its fullest,” he told the gathered press, highlighting mobility, broadband and the cloud.
In terms of mobility, Gilstrap maintained that it was no longer a question of when to get ON-line, but attempting to minimize our time OFF-line, as people and businesses now want to be able to accomplish all of their tasks no matter where they are.
When it comes to broadband, people are demanding better quality and higher speeds, which in turn enables new business processes, new value networks and new ways for machines to speak to one another in order to improve accessibility of goods and services.
Finally, that amorphous topic, the cloud, which Gilstrap said enables applications, and lowers entry levels by reducing costs.
“These three forces together open up a new interaction logic in the networks built on presence, identity, location and preferences,” he said adding that in turn this enabled new activities in society that were transformed by ICT (healthcare, transport, utilities, media etc).
To show how rapidly the world is evolving towards a networked society model, Gilstrap noted that just five years ago, data traffic amounted to less than 15% of total mobile revenue, but that today, mobile data traffic had already surpassed voice. The share of revenues coming from data is growing steadily for all operators, he affirmed, noting that some operators today are even seeing as much as 50% of mobile revenues coming from data. This is particularly true in Japan.
Meanwhile, recent studies show that 70% of Americans will be using cloud-based applications by 2020—both at work and in their free time. But, as Gilstrap pointed out, “the cloud doesn’t exist unless you have fast, good quality mobile broadband to access those apps, which means BIG/Fast PIPES.”
Of course, that isn’t easy when the number of data connections and amount of traffic increases. “We think that mobile data traffic will be doubling ANNUALLY from this year onward,” Gilstrap said.
Breaking that down, he noted that there were 650 million mobile broadband subscribers in 2010, which would grow to one billion this year and reach over five billion by 2016. The firm is also anticipating 8.5 billion mobile subscriptions globally by 2016, 3 billion more in just five years, indicating that there is still a lot of growth to be had in the space.
Live events, he said, were also becoming a massive source of data traffic, taking the recent royal wedding as an example.
“Two billion people around the world watched the wedding in various ways – the live stream of the wedding broke all previous Internet records for traffic – with 3 million simultaneous viewers estimated by Akamai for their part alone. This is twice the previous record for simultaneous viewers for online coverage of the World Cup in soccer,” he revealed.
Indeed, it’s certainly no secret that video is one of the main drivers of expanding network capacity – “just try using the Internet in the US on Friday night when your neighbors are all watching Netflix,” he half joked.
Ericsson, which operates in over 180 countries, is also putting a lot of emphasis on China, India, and Southeast Asia, banking on strong growth in population, increases in GDP and advances in technology which the firm believes will lead to a tremendous growth in data usage.
“China and India account for over 90 million new mobile subscribers each quarter,” declared Gilstrap, “that’s close to 50% percent of all the world’s new additions every quarter.”
Indeed, Ericsson’s own research purports that over the past year, India has seen a 70% increase in time spent per week on the internet, something sure to have a profound effect on mobile broadband.
Add to that the fact that close to 800 million people in the aforementioned markets are aged between 5 and 14 today, an astounding number of people who will very soon be joining the pool of global consumers able to afford a mobile phone.
“Kids will start their digital lives at an inflection point between affordability, accessible technology and empowerment through information,” Gilstrap said, adding that Ericsson’s strategy was “to provide the framework for their mobility, innovation freedom, and access to the cloud for all applications and information they will need.”
Speaking about some of the future applications that would tempt more people into truly networked society, Gilstrap gave examples of bringing unseen value to transactions like banking, where a user could potentially take a photo of an item in a shop and connect to their personal budget in their banking database. Or use their mobile device as a virtual driver’s license, or scan a bar code to get a bill of materials.
Gilstrap said Ericsson was being approached on a daily basis by car manufacturers, broadcasters, game studios, educators and “all sorts of industries” wanting to get their products connected and onto mobile devices.
“Each major industry will be impacted in a positive manner. Mobile communications will equate to empowerment,” he affirmed adding that Ericsson would “certainly be the key driver on the deployment side.”
“Our job is to help make operators’ businesses better,” he went on, concluding that Ericsson would strive to do so in a way that made it easier and more efficient for all involved.
