After four days in Dubai, Telecom World 2012 drew to a close. From the Opening Ceremony, through the Leadership Summit, workshops and roundtables the conference covered a wide variety of subjects. With Heads of State, Ministers, Regulators, mobile and fixed carriers and hardware and software infrastructure suppliers present at the show, the telecoms stakeholder community is as vibrant, energetic and diverse as ever. With an eco-system as sophisticated as telecoms perhaps the key theme of the event has been collaboration.
Collaboration is in the DNA of the ITU and Telecom World. It is the glue that binds the industry together. However, as Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary General, ITU said in his opening address, the future is characterised with change as the only constant. Dr Touré passed gracious thanks to Telecom World host city Dubai and noted that when the event convenes in 12 months’ time it will be in the gateway to Asia – Bangkok, Thailand.
Of all the themes discussed over the past four days, the rise in prominence of Over-The-Top (OTT) players was perhaps most commonly heard. “When people talk about OTT players, we’ve discussed whether they’re a threat or opportunity. Almost universally the collaboration with OTT players is seen as an opportunity,” noted event curator Stuart Sharrock chairman of Telemates.
The telecoms industry is often criticised for being conservative in nature, with the pace of change in ICT so rapid that standards cannot hope to keep up. It was fantastic therefore to see how innovative telecoms can be when presented with the opportunity. Both Laina Greene, CEO and lead consultant, GET-IT and Brahmina Sanou, Director, ITU-D, patron of the Young Innovators, were effusive in their praise for the stars of the future. Four hundred ideas were submitted from 77 countries with 12 chosen as winners by the ITU.
Young Innovator Anshul Tewari took the stage: “When I received the email letting me know that I had been chosen, I was humbled, not just because I would be coming to such a conference, but also because I would get to meet some great minds. This has been a six day accelerator programme – meeting people who have been there and done that, learning how to turn our ideas into reality. Simple conversations between people are making things happen,” he said.
The other 11 winning Young Innovators also took to the stage to receive their awards. For a full listing of the ideas visit http://world2012.itu.int/competition-entries.
NETWORKS WITH A HUMAN FACE
- Network personalization is of increasing interest and importance
- Standardization is vital to introduce the economies of scale that will bring down costs and propel deployment
- To build sustainable business models, telcos must go beyond the ICT sector to bring in users and services across sectors such as government, education and health
- Dialogue between industry players and with external sectors is key to future infrastructure development
Designing the networks of the future is a task that must be begun now - and must take into consideration the need for a more human-centric approach, and for sustainability at the level of networks as well as that of business models.
For Alojz Hudobivnik, Product Marketing Manager, Iskratel, given that ICTs are a key enabler for improving the quality of life for all humanity, the industry must move faster in adapting to its new role in subsidizing other functions in society, supporting other industry sectors such as health and education in driving socio-economic development.
"The requirement comes directly from society to improve on the past and to become ubiquitous," he said, "With M2M this means connecting not just humans to other humans, but connecting machines and devices to one another in the Internet of Things. "But the machine level must be at a different level from the human one, clearly allowing us to live out our ideas and supply the needs of our daily life. The machines, devices and networks are simply facets of technology as an enabler - and to ensure sustainable ecosystems, we must avoid any kind of limitation, whether on network coverage or on human knowledge.
Huawei CTO, Sangi Li, pointed out that we are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what smart networks in a connected world can achieve. Carrier networks are, and will continue to be, just one part of the global network of the future, and these carrier networks are currently facing several major challenges. These include building infrastructure services that target services revenue growth, in particular through the virtualization of data centres; optimizing and monetizing the network by making it visible, using analytics to uncover its potential and programme ability; and dealing successfully with the OTT challenge, either by differentiating, competing or cooperating with the new market players.
He underlined the importance of overlay models to enable seamless migration from multi vendor, multi-generation legacy networks to new networks supporting converged services. "Empowering the whole ecosystem through the carrier is a fundamental part of ICT convergence using the openness of the network and the intelligence at its edge".
Personalization is critical, claimed Steve Alexander, CTO and Senior VP, Ciena, pointing out that if human faces were network connections we would all look identical and unidentifiable. He called for a fundamental change from thinking of networks as a collection of static pipes to a flexible, dynamic, fluid and highly-programmable platform model.
"The network from the viewpoint of human interaction and actual user experience has never been more important than today," he said. Carriers are competing on quantity and quality of connections, and must now bring together the three basic functions of connect, compute and store to provide a model for future carrier services.
Atsushi Takahara, Director, NTT Network Innovation Laboratories urged greater consideration of how individuals or subscribers view the internet, and how different services carried by networks could be integrated into a single platform or "my network" for the benefit of end users, and to increase both resilience and personal security. "Personalized data is very important for next generation networks," he said, "especially when considering how to integrate ICTs and M2M. But as well as accessing the networking society, we must also be able to protect ourselves from it."
Future networks should be secure, resilient and localized, agreed the panellists, even if achieving all three may mean relinquishing complete control of security to enable the personal to be programmed.
ARE WE REALLY SECURE
Key Points:
- We are not secure – because technology can also be corrupted and people will always make mistakes
- Total security is a threat to dignity and liberty
- There should be more transparency for consumers
- Striking the right balance between security and freedom needs collaboration
Synopsis
Are we secure The short answer is no. On the internet or in the physical world. In fact, the boom in connectivity and globalisation means that we are becoming less secure. This is not the hyperbolic message of a security software vendor, this is the pragmatic and realistic consideration that since technologies are created by people, they are always open to corruption and since security is controlled by humans, users and service providers, there will always be mistakes that lead to security flaws.
“The industry has changed, the whole industry use to be marketing around fear, uncertainty and doubt,” said Tareque Choudhury, Chief Security Officer, BT Global Services. “We heard people blaming security providers for creating viruses. Forget the internet, just walking around on the streets, are you secure No. But we are such a connected society, now we are at risk from anywhere in the world. It is becoming more of a problem.”
Charles Brookson, Director Zeata Security, Chairman of GSMA Security Group, echoed those views: “I don’t think we are secure. As a technologist I know we’re not. No one can design the perfect system. As a user, we get it wrong sometimes, we make the wrong decisions. Half the world are of below average intelligence, by definition, so we have a population that doesn’t understand.”
The answer though is not just to add more and more layers of security. This runs the risk of impinging on the very things that security should protect: dignity and liberty. “I don’t want to be totally secure,” said Luca Bolognini, President of Italian Institute for Privacy. “Total security is the risk, in my opinion. I don’t want to be totally protected. Sometimes some rights and interests are used as Trojan horse in order to violate the rights that they are set up to protect. We have to be aware and avoid the overdose.”
Without the ability or arguably the desire to be totally secure, the answer moving forward is to strike the right balances between risk and privacy. Transparency and collaboration among citizens, governments and technology providers are the vital ingredients when attempting to strike those balances. “It is a question of balance, and consumers need transparency. I will happily give up information to stop people harming me, but by the same token or I also want my private life to stay private. It is a tricky situation where you put the balance. So it is therefore a matter of transparency and involving stakeholders in the debate,” concluded Mr Brookson.
