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Monday 1 March 2010

Next Gen Applications

Considering the FTTH council Lisbon event was booked to be mainly about Next Gen apps, I feel a bit hard done by. This is not against the Council by any means. I think it reflects their lean to vendors rather than consumers, and that can be addressed.

However, not only was there nothing approaching next gen in the venue, most of the vendors are still missing that interconnect between their hardware, the fibre, and the apps those of us who are consumers want to use.

3D TV was 'nice' but then so is Project Natal. What else was on show? Home and business security. Telemedicine apps. E-education. Um. No, actually, none of those were noticeably there! But then it is not a consumer show.

The majority of apps that were on show are still in the talking stage. We hear that PT, ONsnet, Vasteras etc are doing consumer and commercial next gen apps ( >2Gbps etc), but there were very few demonstrations of them. I saw more next gen apps sitting in the Utopia Mobile NOC last month than in the FTTH Council conference but, once again, that's because that was about selling FTTH, not kit.

It seems to me that if you want to 'sell' FTTH, you must demonstrate it. So, the students and I joined a few dots and came up with some ideas to show next gen apps, which have since been extended during and after the colloquium on Friday.

If you have a next generation application, why not get in touch with me? If you have a valid use of FTTH, even if it is still on the drawing board, then I may have a chance for you to show it off at a global event.

Whatever you can envisage being done over high bandwidth, symmetrical bandwidth, FTTH, to consumers, patients, businesses, pupils, public sector - please let us know.





4 comments:

Pauline said...

I heard lots about services, but that's because I spent all my time in the content and services stream. If you stay on the exhibition floor, of course you'll meet all the vendors.

The conversation between the different players in the value chain is only just starting. The guy from Philips Medical said he had been unaware of the FTTH Council Europe and it's work before being invited to speak in Lisbon, and yet one of the key challenges for healthcare is infrastructure.

Philips is very interested in getting good connectivity to patient homes for "compliance monitoring" - keeping an eye on the patient to make sure they are following the treatment regime. Apparently this is big reason that treatments fail.

I think the fact that the different players in the ecosystem are becoming aware of how they can help each other is a huge step forward.

I'm currently finishing up a post on my blog about content and applications. Will be up soon.

Cybersavvy UK said...

I heard plenty about services in sessions too, but nothing new compared to say, Copenhagen last year, or Amsterdam in 2004. Maybe that's my problem, I am becoming innured to how much I have learned about the "possible" now.

I wanted to see some fantastic apps at work, whether in video or Powerpoint presentations, or on the floor. Demos of novel, innovative, ground-breaking apps would have made all the difference.

But then again, this is why Google is going into FTTH - to stimulate the creation of the infrastructure which will enable the innovation which as yet we cannot imagine.

The Philips Medical comment that he had not heard of the FTTH Council Europe (http://www.ftthcouncil.eu) is interesting as I have heard this over and over again this past month or two in the run up and post-conference. It concerns me that this under the radar existence of the Council is still ongoing at a time when everyone involved in delivering digital should know about it.

As a marketer, I want to be involved in improving this, especially in the UK, and hope some of the ideas put forward to the Board may yield fruit.

Unknown said...

my impression was that we moved to the next phase, to those application that take fibre for granted. Like OECD's presentation which started with the thought-provoking example of closed schools due to pandemic... Fibre is the answer if they are closed for a month or so...

Another example is the cloud applications. It starts small with YahooMail and Gmail, and evolved to the stage where FTTH is a must. Like backups on the cloud.

So FTTH becomes an infra, and as time passes, more and more people realizes it is a must. Gamers know that (and presented it), heavy Internet users know that, and it seems to me that everybody under the age of 20 knows that.
How long will it take to the financial community to get it? I don't know.

Cybersavvy UK said...

Galit, I think this may be my problem! Having heard about many of these apps for so long now, I take it for granted that everyone knows about them and therefore makes that natural assumption about needing FTTH and fibre. The problem is that many people have *not* heard about them and have no idea what can be done.

In the UK, we are still faffing around talking about copper and legacy techs to offer up to 2Mbps as a USC, when what we should be talking about are the fantastic applications and services other countries are now using, as well as demoing.

Whilst they may not seem ground-breaking to some of us, to others they are novel and mind-blowing.