At CDNLive EMEA in Munich this week, there were two keynotes. The first was by Tom Beckley and was similar to the keynote that he presented at CDNLive Silicon Valley. You can read about it in my blog post . The second keynote was by Ulf Ewaldsson, the CTO of Ericsson titled, Paving the Way for 5G: Opportunities Beyond Smartphones . He started by pointing out that Ericsson is a startup. Or, at least it was. It was created in 1876 in a garage in Stockholm, Sweden, by Lars Magnus Ericsson (hence the full name of the company Telefonaktiebolaget L. M. Ericsson). It was originally a telegraph repair shop, but a couple of years later it also started to sell telephones. Today it is the largest manufacturer of telephone equipment, primarily cellular basestations. The market has consolidated a lot and while there used to be many competitors to Ericsson, now there are basically just two other companies, Nokia Networks and Huawei. It is large, too, having grown from two people in a garage to a $33B corporation. Of course during that period, it has gone from wired telephones based on mechanical switching, to wired telephones based on computers in the 1960s, to the situation today where mobile completely dominates. In fact, even calling it telephony nowadays is a misnomer. There are 5 exabytes per month of mobile data, but only 300 petabytes of that is voice. Half of the rest is video. We are in a world with over 7B mobile subscriptions (but only 4.6B subscribers, due to people with multiple phones/SIMs). Ulf predicted that by 2021, the data traffic will go up by a factor of 11, with video up to 70% of that. The pace of change is accelerating. It took 100 years to go from nothing to 1 billion connected places (using wired phones). Then it took just 25 years to go from nothing to 5 billion connected people. It will only take 15 years to go to 28 billion connected devices. We have gone through 1G, 2G, 3G and are now on 4G. Next is 5G, of course, and Ulf believes that it will be transformational. Major changes like this cause massive industry transformations and, often, the winners in the first phase are not the winners in the second. Ulf used the steam engine as an example. Originally deployed to pump water out of coal mines, it soon totally transformed transportation with the invention and deployment of the steam train. Ericsson is transforming, too. In 1999, three quarters of its business was hardware and now that is down to one-third , with the rest being software and services. As an example of how much the need to change all the time drives Ericsson, last year they hired 14,000 people, but they also fired 15,000. However, the really big transformation is in other industries. Publishing was the first to be affected and soon all media will go into the cloud. TV is being transformed, and many other industries will be transformed by the coming 5G mobile with huge bandwidth and all those connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be, and one implication is that everything that can be will be shared. There will be no point for most people in having a personal vehicle that is unused 90% of the time. Young people seem to have less desire to own "things" that Ulf and his generation did. He pointed out that he owns a chainsaw and yet uses it approximately one hour every two years, which is even more silly. The young just want to cut down trees. Another change is what Ulf called the horizontalization of technology, whereby parts of the system can be changed independently. A cellular network is like that as individual basestations are upgraded with 5G technology. Ulf's conclusion is that 5G will have a major effect on industries beyond smartphones. Although they are not precisely the same, 5G and the internet of things (IoT) are complementary. The "things" need connectivity and Ericsson plans to be a major contributor providing it. Previous: DAC: One Month and CountingImage may be NSFW.
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