London comes alive with innovation
With London 2012 in full swing there is no doubting the Games have brought a tremendous feeling of positivity across the UK capital.
Last Friday I was able to witness this first hand as some of the shining lights of innovation gathered for the Global Business Summit on ICT to showcase what UK business has to offer in innovation and creativity.
ICT Enabling London 2012 was one very topical area of focus, along with (what is very close to our hearts) a session on ‘Broadband everywhere’.
Broadband everywhere featured seminars from industry leaders including UK Broadband, Telefonica UK, Openreach, TalkTalk and NEC.
I was fortunate enough to be able to present my perspective which centred on how innovative technologies like CBNL’s point-to-multipoint (PMP), which were first adopted in emerging markets, are now gaining traction in developed markets due to the explosion in mobile broadband.
You can watch a recording of the ‘Broadband everywhere’ session here, my presentation starts at 1.21.54.
A lot of our early success as a company was in emerging markets in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for the mobile network operators has always been lower than in developed markets.
This makes cost effective technology like PMP very attractive to these operators.
In order for the business case for the network as a whole to stay within the bounds of that low ARPU, they have to deliver bits of information to the user’s handset in the most cost effective way possible.
The really interesting phenomenon we can observe now, given the explosion in mobile broadband, is that developed markets are starting to see this same pressure.
It arises not because the ARPU for developed market users is dropping – it is more or less static – but because each of those users is consuming more and more bits of information.
Therefore each of those bits has to be delivered in a more and more cost effective fashion.
So we’re seeing the innovations like ours, that were first adopted in developing markets, being rolled out in developed markets for next generation networks.
A recent stat from Cisco paints a great backdrop to this data demand and of CBNL’s own growth - last year's mobile data traffic was eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000 (incidentally the very year CBNL was founded).
I don’t think I have ever seen any projection that says that data growth is going to tail off or plateau, so the challenges continue to grow in proportion to the user expectation.
More and more innovation in all parts of the network will be needed to keep up, and we’re very excited to be a part of that.