Solid as a rock

Gavin Allen: The World Broadband Association exists to champion universal access to reliable broadband services. What would you say is the "killer app" for broadband right now?

Martin Creaner: Reliability may become the killer app for broadband. There's never been a shortage of ideas for what to do with bandwidth if it's reliable.

As you offer higher speeds, you unleash a new set of potential applications. It's no longer just HD video; it's 4K or 8K video, or 4K VR or XR services. It's a glasses-free, 3D TV. This opens the gates for a new set of services.

In manufacturing, high-resolution monitoring of individual processes by 4K video cameras is streamed in real-time. In healthcare, everything from remote [diagnostic] services to robotic surgery. We're still a long way away from robotic surgery, but we are seeing other types of healthcare scenarios, such as scans [such as X-rays or MRIs looked at in real time by AI at massive levels of scale.

In retail, we're seeing applications as we move to higher-resolution location services. In the home, it's about entertainment, gaming, and home security services. It's not just the demand for any individual service, but the aggregated demand for dozens, if not hundreds of services. That’s what gives you the requirement for high-speed broadband.

Gavin Allen: What about the developing world?

Martin Creaner: They've got a different set of challenges because they leapfrogged fixed networks and went straight to mobile. Now, they're realizing they have to take a step back and start putting in a core infrastructure, a fixed-line fiber network. If it's not in place, they're going to find themselves in a dead end, only able to rely on mobility. Even though mobility will constantly get better, it still won’t be good enough for some of the more advanced services that we've talked about.

For that reason, we're seeing a strong push across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other regions to invest heavily in rolling out fiber broadband networks in order to plug that gap.

Gavin Allen: What effect do you think AI will have on enterprise scenarios?

Martin Creaner: Obviously, we've seen GenAI throwing a rock in the pond of many, many businesses from a user point of view. Consultancies such as McKinsey are looking at this closely. AI may well radically transform the types of staffing they need in the business and how they generate value for their customers.

You also see it in healthcare. I mentioned healthcare before, but we're seeing AI beginning to transform your average medical practice. In most parts of the world, there’s a shortage of General Practitioners. Rather than just adding more GPs, you can have the same number of GPs with a few AI diagnosticians supporting them. You walk into your medical facility for surgery and a camera looks at the spot on your hand and tells you whether it's nothing or whether you need to see a doctor. It's that level of change that’s transforming important businesses. This will impact everybody in the developed world.

Gavin Allen: And what's the industry impact of increased convergence between network and cloud infrastructures?

Martin Creaner: Manufacturing is an interesting one, because the industry is still very nervous about relying on technology for their core business. They want to keep everything inside the factory walls. They don't trust connectivity and the cloud to be an integral failure path within their manufacturing process.

Cloud and networks will become more tightly integrated and more predictable in terms of how they're going to behave. For years, we've been able to scale up or scale down, our cloud requirements in an instant, whereas we haven't been able to adjust our network requirements in the same elastic fashion.

That's changing now. I think we are reaching a tipping point in the manufacturing industry where, if they can genuinely see that the network and the cloud are elastic and changeable in the same fashion, and just as reliable as the internal metrics they use within their factory, then we could see a radical change in terms of how factories use data and how they use the cloud to manufacture products.

Gavin Allen: Is that convergence between network and cloud happening fast enough, given what industries want to achieve?

Martin Creaner: No. Certain things are moving faster than the industry has ever needed, demanded, or imagined. And AI is an example of that. But I think the speed of movement, of the convergence of the network and the cloud, is still moving a bit too slowly for the industry. So we need to accelerate our activities in that area.