Rebooting telecom innovation

Last summer several individuals, including representatives from Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, published a White Paper on the need to boost innovation in the telecom industry.

Don Clarke

Six months and many conversations later, the group published its second paper, this time focussing on the communications service providers (CSPs), vendors and the investor community.

The paper, entitled Developing a Code of Conduct Framework for the Telecom Ecosystem, highlights four areas to spur innovation: Funding, Innovation Processes, Competition and Procurement.

The code-of-conduct paper offers guidelines as to how CSPs can work with vendors, especially small and medium-sized ones that lack the resources of the larger established vendors.

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Telecoms' innovation problem and its wider cost

Imagine how useful 3D video calls would have been this last year.

The technologies needed - a light field display and digital compression techniques to send the resulting data across a network - do exist but practical holographic systems for communication remain years off.

Source: Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena

But this is just the sort of application that telcos should be pursuing to benefit their businesses.

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Silicon photonics: concerns but viable and still evolving

Blaine Bateman set himself an ambitious goal when he started researching the topic of silicon photonics. The president of the management consultancy, EAF LLC, wanted to answer some key questions for a broad audience, not just academics and researchers developing silicon photonics but executives working in data centres, telecom and IT.

The result is a 192-page report entitled Silicon Photonics: Business Situation Report, 59 pages alone being references. In contrast to traditional market research reports, there is also no forecast or company profiles. 

Blaine Bateman's risk meter for silicon photonics. Eleven key elements needed to deploy a silicon photonics solution were considered. And these were assessed from the perspective of various communities involved or impacted by the technology, from silicon providers to cloud-computing users. Source: EAF LLC.

“I thought it would be helpful to give people a business view,” says Bateman.

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The connected vehicle - driving in the cloud

Cars are already more silicon than steel. As makers add LTE high speed broadband, they are destined to become more app than automobile. The possibilities that come with connecting your car to the cloud are scintillating. No wonder Gil Golan, director at General Motors' Advanced Technical Center in Israel, says the automotive industry is at an 'inflection point'.

"If you put LTE to the vehicle ... you are going to open a very wide pipe and you can send to the cloud and get results with almost no latency"

Gil Golan, General Motors

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Rational and innovative times: JDSU's CTO Q&A Part II

Brandon Collings, JDS Uniphase's CTO for communications and commercial optical products, talks about fostering innovation and what is coming after 100 Gigabit optical transmission. Part II of a Q&A with Gazettabyte.

"What happens after 100 Gig is going to be very interesting"

Brandon Collings (right), JDSU

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