EVERY day, a quarter of the world's population connects online using Nokia Siemens Networks infrastructure and equipment.
And if the chief executive of the company, Rajeev Suri, has his way, that number will increase as more and more people turn to mobility and wireless technologies to get their internet fix.
Suri, who has headed the company since September last year, says the blurring boundaries between fixed and wireless telecommunications services have led to an explosive growth in data services as people connect devices to the internet and ultimately each other, whenever, wherever they are.
"There are a number of networks which are experiencing a 100 per cent increase in traffic every few months," Suri says. "We predict there will be a 10,000 per cent increase in mobile data traffic over the next five years, which will equate to around 23 exabytes of data being consumed every day.
"That's the equivalent to the world's 6.3 billion population downloading a digitised book every day."
For Suri, there's no debate about whether fixed or wireless internet technology is superior, it's simply about getting connected.
With its acquisition of the wireless-network equipment division of Motorola earlier this year, Nokia Siemens Networks is poised to strengthen its position in the mobile market and is keeping an eager eye on new developments across the world, including the National Broadband Network.
If we take a long view of fixed broadband deployments such as fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks and compare them with mobile broadband, such as LTE (Long Term Evolution), what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of both?
Fixed is obviously going to handle much, much higher traffic for the foreseeable future with all the video and data-intensive apps that happens over fixed. And in wireless you have to remember that spectrum is a natural resource that costs money and you don't have anything like that in fixed. You can put all-you-can-eat data on fixed for as long as you can imagine, but you cannot do that in wireless because it's just not sustainable.
We will get to a point where you are watching TV with your fixed connection and then move into your car and have that same seamless service on your iPad or smartphone. So I think (the line between) fixed and wireless will be blurred.
Fixed is the biggest driver of traffic still, but people want to increasingly do more and more things on mobile.
Is Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) supplying any gear for any FTTH builds across the world?
We are working on a number of them at the moment. I think, of course, that Australia is leading with this and in the area of optical backbone we have had a lot of momentum in the third quarter. The optical business has grown year on year at healthy levels and we have done a number of deals in the US. We see ourselves in a good space in that area. But optical is not just driven by FTTH type deals; it is also driven by the evolution of mobile broadband. So if you are moving towards HSPA+ and LTE, the first thing you need to upgrade is your mobile backhaul transport layer so optical comes into play.
What's driving more demand for optical fibre deployments? Backhaul for mobile deployments of FTTH builds?
I think it (optical fibre) is a bigger driver as part of the mobile broadband business ecosystem rather than just FTTH deals. We have good momentum there.
What type of split is NSN seeing between FTTH deployments and mobile backhaul?
The lines are blurred. I would say, however, that it is more driven for us by mobile backhaul.
We are a leader in mobile broadband and have 184 3G customers and so for us it's driven more by operators that are strengthening their mobile broadband infrastructure.
What are your thoughts on the Australian government's plans to build a national broadband network?
I see it as a sensible thing to do. Australia is leading with this and there are other countries in Europe and US that are starting to follow the same pattern.
NSN is supplying equipment for a number of telcos that are investigating the use of LTE as an extension of their mobile networks. When will we see commercial releases of LTE?
The first commercial releases are already happening in Japan with Docomo and they are the leader in the world with that.
From a commercial point of view, we are already demonstrating voice calls with the best latency in the world on LTE and really good data throughput with 100Mbps peak speeds.
In Sweden, we are getting average speeds of 50Mbps so we are in really good shape when it comes to being commercially ready for LTE.
Recently I even watched HDTV on LTE and latency is very important for that. Imagine playing the Wii ping pong game, from your end you would hit the ball, but then it wouldn't come back if the latency wasn't right. So you need that low latency LTE can now enable. It's a whole different ball game because LTE is optimised for end-to-end data.
LTE is going to be very different in what it can do in terms of upload and download. But that said, I also think HSPA+ has a long way to go in terms of speed and average throughput. We have demonstrated 112Mbps with dual carrier technology so HSPA still has a long life in capability.
(C) Australian IT
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