Beyond connectivity: The ‘gigabyte revolution’

The latest trends in mobile are leading the “gigabyte revolution” which will take us to the one gigabyte per user per day by 2020, says CEO of Nokia Networks Rajeev Suri.

The evolution of mobile technology will lend itself to an era where connectivity will be a human right and download speeds will be 10 times what they are now.

Suri was speaking at the Korea Communications Conference, which explores the journey of mobility and its future potential.

“Connectivity will be a human right, and it will be about personal context and a family of devices on the same platform. Today we are already starting to see sensors, machine to machine communication and intelligent applications,” says Suri.

“The operators main challenge is how to make a compelling and profitable customer experience, on a communications network level, the challenge is how to make networks flexible enough for rapidly changing environment and end-user behaviour,” he explains.

Suri also advises that customer experience is a key differentiator that we need to be mindful of. He reckons smartphone users are more likely than users of other devices to rate messaging and internet quality as the reason they stay with their service provider:

“Broadband needs to be built and managed intelligently to build customer loyalty ad truly benefit from new business opportunities that exist today and the future.”

An engagement economy

Suri believes that 2.8-billion social media profiles, 60 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, HD streaming and collaborative gaming has led us into an engaged economy. This economy sees diverse content every day. Connectivity and context exist seamlessly within it. This is also changing the nature of content as consumers create content and productivity and efficiency improve. He reckons the technology will get so powerful that is almost invisible. This engagement economy is the starting point of the gigabyte revolution.

What the gigabyte revolution needs

The world of tomorrow requires 10 times more sites to cope with demand. It will also require 10 times more performance for every user and 1 000 times more capacity to run. To cope with these new demands, Nokia Siemens Networks introduced Liquid Net.

“Today’s customers use the internet wherever they are, switching from fixed to mobile broadband networks as they move around. They are constantly using new devices, applications and services. We can help you keep ahead of the curve, predicting patterns of bandwidth usage and avoiding spikes in network demand,” says Nokia Siemens Networks.

According to Suri, Liquid Net “unleashes frozen network capacity into a reservoir of resources”. Enabling users broadband network to instantly adapt to “unpredictable changes in end-user demand and boost the network utilization”.