“The state of the industry is a getting just a bit better… there’s room for optimism,” said Sean Maloney, Executive VP and GM of Intel’s Communications Group, speaking at a keynote at this year’s NGN conference in Boston. Neither the boom nor bust cycle lasts forever, said Maloney, but even when recovery occurs, OPEX pressures will remain. There will be a constant need to do more for less. Intel is betting that a transition to “modular networks” will be among the major changes in the industry. The shift to modular equipment components will be driven by standardization and open technology, leading to new designs in areas such as metro networks and 3G base stations.
But the next big thing is really in broadband wireless. Intel predicts WiFi and WiMax will have an enormous impact on networks in homes, schools, cities, and even remote, rural areas. How big? When it launched its Centrino initiative in March, Intel said it would certify 15,000 hotspots by the end of 2003. The actual number of Centrino hotspots is now expected to be in the 25,000 to 30,000 range. About 50% of the deployments are in Asia. But this is small change compared to what is to come. Between 2003 and 2013 Maloney predicts that the number of installed Wi-Fi access points (public and private) will rise from 8 million to 700 million. He envisions that a similar growth trend in longer distance wireless access will also happen. Wi-Max, which Maloney describes as “the big brother of Wi-Fi”, is moving ahead in the standardization process and the large Asian manufacturers are gearing up for mass production.
For unbelievers, Maloney pointed out that many cynics also doubted that camera phones could become a mass phenomenon. In many markets, they are rapidly becoming the defacto standard — whether we like it or not. Once the tornado starts, second order effects will also appear. For instance, camera phone users in Asia are using their phones as a handheld scanner to read bar codes in stores and then instantly open a browser with further information on the product.
If ubiquitous wireless coverage is a reasonable scenario, what else will change? In a multimedia presentation, Maloney cited examples of new applications. The Harvard Medical School is digitally encoding all of its lectures (including indexing via speech recognition) and making them available to students via the Web. All lectures are available online and can be searched via any key word that may have been used during the presentation. The process of encoding, indexing and posting the material is completely automated, requiring no human intervention. Students with wireless-enabled laptops can access the video server from anywhere on campus.
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