ProAV SEAsia: Green shoots of AV development

AV Magazine

From established markets in Northeast Asia, to emerging ones in the South and South-East, the whole Asia Pacific region is adopting video-based innovation at an unprecedented pace.

https://www.avinteractive.com/features/territory-features/green-shoots-av-development-16-05-2019/

Although pro AV is still relatively young in Southeast Asia AVIXA estimates that the region represents a $6.3 billion market growing at a CAGR of 5.9 per cent through 2023 to reach $8 billion.

InfoComm Southeast Asia opens in Bangkok this May which is a big signifier that many of the brands are seeing increased traction in the area. “Price drops in the cost of AV products and international businesses beginning to hold larger technology and infrastructure budgets are converging to drive strong growth in the region, even in higher end technology arenas,” observes Glenn Bailey, vice-president APAC, SiliconCore Technology.

However, the adoption rate and investment in new technologies differs across the region and the pace for this transition from traditional to digital AV varies.

“While Singapore and Malaysia have a huge banking, infrastructure and international business community with strong corporate AV markets, developing countries like Thailand and Vietnam are still much in the early stage on the technology curve,” Bailey says.

“In general, most markets are shifting towards digital AV but with the convergence of AV over IP, the pro AV industry is likely to shift towards more software-based solutions and this may render some of the AV products within a traditional corporate installation obsolete,” says Candice Siow, Kramer’s regional senior sales and marketing manager. The company is one of many basing their presence in the region out of Singapore, seen as the most business friendly hub to service adjacent markets in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and beyond.

“The pro AV market is fairly mature in Singapore, and the technological adaptability rate is much faster and quicker than in neighbours like Indonesia,” says Siow. “In project tenders, you will frequently see requirements for 4K support, smart meeting rooms and control and management systems. In Singapore, we are seeing many installations of large LED displays in retail malls and even commercial buildings where owners and developers are vying for the attention of the consumers and tenants.” The potential to increase digital signage, security/surveillance, and performance/entertainment solutions is strong.

SiliconCore notes a rise in the use of large format displays in retail applications, predominantly in Singapore. “We are focused on the niche of fine pitch, direct view LED videowalls and the display market in some regions is starting to invest in high quality LED displays in corporate, control room and high end retail environments,” says Bailey.

Region’s tourism reliance
The region heavily relies on tourism, which is an area of investment for both international and domestic brands, with hotels, retail and leisure brands all looking to create luxury guest and tourist experiences. Smart city investment is a huge market in Malaysia while Singapore’s two integrated resorts (IRs) are set to invest S$9 billion in expansion. The exclusivity period for both casinos is being extended past the original 2017 expiry date to end in 2030 instead.

The investment, reports Christie, will include a 1,000 room all-suite tower at Marina Bay Sands, a 15,000-seat arena and extensions to Universal Studios Singapore aside from additional gaming provisions. In Taiwan, Siow reports that the military/defence sector is shifting from traditional AV to digital AV for its surveillance needs. Following Japan’s 2020 Olympic announcement on 8K projection, Kramer has begun seeing 8K DOOH advertisements.

“It will be interesting to see how the pro AV industry keeps pace. While the market hasn’t fully settled in on 4K functionality, we are now looking at the transition to 8K technology,” says Siow.

In the corporate market, across the region, collaboration technologies, AVoIP and 4K are all spurring new spending. Systems replacement cycles have also been shortening as a result of rapid technology advance.

“As the working practices evolve, many organisations are moving towards flexible work arrangements and team collaboration,” Siow says. “We are seeing an increase in collaborative working and huddle space rooms and expect significant growth in this area.”

Jenny Li, sales manager for B-Tech AV Mounts in APAC calls the market “vigorous” and “generally growing fast.”

“The Thai market seems cost sensitive,” she adds. “Systems integrators prefer cheaper products and don’t mind spending more time on installation. Indonesia chases for efficiency more than cost.”

Peerless-AV reports demand for “quality, field proven and UL safety tested commercial grade products that companies aren’t able to find elsewhere on the market,” according to Brian McClimans, vice-president, sales, North America and APAC. “For example, a Malaysian cruise ship company reached out to us about commercial grade outdoor displays that would be robust enough to withstand the harsh salt water, windy conditions on deck while at sea.”

Jamie Hind, sales director APAC at Exterity, describes the region as “incredibly tech-savvy and forward-thinking.” He adds: “Throughout Asia-Pacific consumers expect sophisticated, technologically-minded solutions and the various industries we operate in are responding to it by deploying more advanced services.”

For Exterity this means designing solutions that create an immersive and exciting visitor or guest experience. “One of the most creative developments we’ve invested in is ‘jackpot integration’. Simply put, we use jackpot feeds based on values, thresholds and other indicators as triggers to deliver any content, to any screen or device anywhere.”

An example of this is, suitably, at the Okada Manila Casino. Hinds says the jackpot integration means clients can communicate with visitors and guests alike, via live IP video, IPTV and digital signage wherever they are – all from a single, centralised platform.

Emerging economies 
Beyond so-called traditional markets such as Hong Kong (Macau) and Singapore, several companies are also seeing huge demand from emerging markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia – “all of which are quickly establishing themselves as fabulous destinations and leveraging the very best that technology can offer,” says Hinds.

Christie picks out Indonesia for “strong potential” particularly in the theme park and entertainment market and within that segment, growth for pro AV requirements in the Dark Ride entertainment rides. This, says Christie, is leading to the demand for brighter, more compact and reliable technologies.

Distances and differences
A major challenge is the geographical size of the APAC regions and the stark differences between the countries. SiliconCore’s APAC HQ is in Sydney from where its team serves the whole of the region. “We make regular demonstrations in each country… some of our largest installations are in Australia, Thailand and Malaysia,” Bailey says. “We also have staff based in a number of SEA countries which gives us a good understanding of the cultural differences between our audiences. In fact, it’s vital for larger project-based sales.”

Kenneth Cheung at Dataton partner Audio Visual Technique is among the few voicing caution. “The uncertain outcome of the Sino-US trade dispute and high value of the US dollar have clouded the otherwise optimistic outlook of the region’s economy,” he says. “The region’s governments are keen in nurturing the growth of creative industries to be the next economic engine after manufacturing and more young people are joining the work force in new media.

“The big challenge for the pro AV industry is to help the young blood master the tools of the trade and generate new growth. To that end, we provide specialised training across the region and, in fact, will be running the first industry-certified Dataton Academy in Bangkok during InfoComm Southeast Asia.”

Behind the scenes: John Wick 3

IBC

Cinematographer Dan Laustsen brings visual panache to the stunt-fuelled franchise.

https://www.ibc.org/production/behind-the-scenes-john-wick-3/3840.article

New York has been photographed thousands of times before so when the city is the main location for your story how do you make it look different? The answer, for director Chad Stahelski and Dan Laustsen ASC, DFF, was to make it rain.

“I love rain,” Laustsen tells IBC365. “It brings a third dimension to the look of the film.”

The Dane has worked with sea water-soaked imagery on The Shape of Water, winning a best cinematography nomination for Guillermo del Toro’s film. For John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, the ultra-stylish sequel to the ultra-stylish ‘gun fu’ action franchise starring Keanu Reeves, rain afforded the opportunity to play with neon lights and headlamps reflected off dark streets, cars, motorbike helmets and windows.

“I knew how to work with rain but it’s incredibly complicated trying to do this in New York. We discussed creating atmospheres with smoke and steam but we’re filming in the summertime and the steam would have disappeared too quickly.

“It’s difficult enough anyway in New York when you need to block streets but bringing in lots of cherry pickers, cranes and rain towers and rigs for back lighting was a challenge.”

The film’s gothic-noir New York exteriors recall scenes from the original Blade Runner but John Wick 3 is altogether slicker and filmed using digital cameras and LED lights, two tools not available to Ridley Scott and DP Jordan Cronenweth in 1982.

‘Bertolucci’ of action films
John Wick certainly isn’t running out of steam. While the first film in 2014 established a narratively sleek template for eponymous uber-assassin (Reeves) exacting revenge on innumerable bad guys with a cocktail of martial arts and gun fighting, the second ‘chapter’, unusually for this type of movie, managed to improve the high-octane formula.

Former stuntman Stahelski (who doubled for Reeves in The Matrix) and cinematographer Jonathan Sela had established how the fights were shot for John Wickbut Laustsen added further sheen, painting the action to resemble an artwork.

“Chad told me he wanted to make the Bertolucci of action films,” Laustsen says, referring to the stunning cinematography of Vittorio Storaro in Bernardo Bertolucci classics like The Conformist and The Last Emperor.

The basic camera rules for the series are shoot wide, shoot steady and shoot fast.

 “Chad comes from a stunt background, so he really is a master when it comes to knowing how to choreograph action,” Lauststen says. “We want to shoot the sequences as wide as possible, because we want the audience to feel that the actors actually are performing the stunts themselves. I feel very strongly that you should shoot as much as you can in the camera on the day. It’s much better than shooting green screen. It’s much better for the actor’s too.”

He continues, “If you move the camera too much, or you make too many cuts in the edit, it can interfere with the audience’s view of the action. So, we keep the camera fluid or with as minimal movement as possible. It’s powerful. When you have a pretty steady camera and you can see what’s happening.”

It’s not just the action of the actors and stunt team that needs choreographing but the position of the camera operators too.

“The actors have spent months rehearsing before we come on set but once we’re there we have to know what we’re doing. We want to shoot very fast, and change set-ups very quickly because Keanu and the other actors want to keep the momentum of the scene going.”

The other key element for Laustsen is lighting and composition. The signature look for the series is high contrast, high impact colour.

 “We are using LED lights for the most part and this means you have a whole world of colour to choose from. Making the precise choice is hugely important.”

In continuity from John Wick 2, the dominant colour scheme is blue to reflect the central character’s banishment from the high table of the assassin’s union.

“The aim was always to make even more powerful images than in [Wick 2],” he explains. “The blue is more of a greeny-steel blue and contrast this with orange, red and amber incandescent lights. When we change from scene to scene, we tried to find at least one of those colour tones in there.”

In an extended fight sequence in a warehouse, for example, electric incandescent lights give the scene an amber hue while the rain outside the windows is steel blue and allows Laustsen to capture reflections of the rain on the ceiling.

 “The desert scene is the only bright daylight scene in the movie, and we wanted that to be a very strong gold as a kind of relief to be free from the dark city scenes,” he says.

“It’s extremely important to me that the colour I film on set isn’t changed in the digital intermediate [postproduction process],” he insists. “Of course, it will change a little, but when everything including costume, makeup, set design, lighting has been designed so carefully for a specific colour palette you don’t want anything to move away from that.”

Laustsen had investigated a larger format Alexa 65 but couldn’t find anamorphic lenses to fit so settled on the ARRI Alexa XT with a pair of Alexa Minis and custom lenses he’d had built for John Wick 2. The set of Master Anamorphics were re-designed by ARRI Rental with a series of internal line filters to provide the bokeh and flaring he was looking for.

“Chad loved the effect, because you got nice flares off the highlights, but the image was still extremely sharp,” he says. “We shot 3.2K ARRI Raw open gate and finished at 2K.”

The only scene set in New York without rain is one involving a motorbike and horse chase under Brooklyn’s iconographic elevated train.

“It would have been too dangerous for the horses to film them galloping in the rain. We had to put rubber mats down on the street for five to six blocks to protect them. Keanu does all the riding in the scene and we’re filming from a trailer.”

On reflection
Another set-piece sequence takes place in room high up in the Continental Hotel where ceiling, floor and interior is made of glass. The cinematography here echoes that of Roger Deakins’ work filming a glass filled room in Skyfall and recalls the house of mirrors shoot out from John Wick 2 (itself a homage to Orson Welles’ climactic scene in The Lady from Shanghai).

Just to make it even more difficult, in John Wick 3 there are giant LED screens playing back vibrant colours inside and outside the glass room.

“Chad wanted this idea from the beginning, and we spent a long time talking about how to achieve it,” Laustsen says. “They built the set about 800 x 400 ft in a studio. It was really complicated to light, so we shot tests and decided on a blue tone for the interiors with the big LED screen on the outside more tuned to red and the screen inside tuned to amber for our contrast colours.

“When you have glass surrounding you 360-degrees you have to be very careful to avoid lights and other equipment being in picture but we had the experience of handling something similar from John Wick 2 and if we had any issue we knew we could erase in post.”

The Continental itself, the hallowed nerve centre of the assassin’s guild, is a composite of various locations including exterior (The Beaver Building in Manhattan), interiors (The Cunard Building in Lower Manhattan) and rooftop (Rockefeller Roof Gardens).

At the beginning of a big shoot out in the Hotel lobby, Laustsen made the decision in the film’s story to have all the lights turned off except for an emergency green lighting strip.

“It was really expensive in terms of human resource to install a hundred metres of LED, but I didn’t want to do a shootout that would look just like any other shootout,” he explains.

A section filmed in a Bedouin-style tent in the Moroccan desert proved equally challenging.

“It’s daylight outside but really dark inside the tent. We had to run 800 metres of cable to the lights inside. Even though you don’t see the desert the challenge was to keep the feeling of desert heat outside without letting so much light into the tent that the background burns out.”

Laustsen was educated as a fashion photographer, wanted to work for National Geographic on documentaries and applied to the National Film School Of Denmark on the advice of his sister.

“When I got the acceptance letter from the school it was a big shock. I’d never dreamt about making movies for a second.”

He shot his first feature aged 25 in 1979, Do We Start Off With a Dance? and in 1984 made acclaimed thriller Nightwatch for director Ole Bornedal. When they remade the movie for the American market a few year later Laustsen was criticised in some quarters for creating images that were too beautiful – a sort of style over substance.

“I think that’s just the Danish mentality. After all, nobody would ever say that Lawrence of Arabia or [Bertolucci’s] 1900 were shot too beautifully. But it is a balancing act. For me, it’s important to make the most powerful image as possible if that is what the scene suggests, or to make it softer or grittier as appropriate for another scene. In any case, movie making is not the result of one person. It is very much a collaboration between director, cinematographer, production design and everyone involved from the gaffer to the dailies team. That said, I believe you need a strong plan about what you are going to do and to execute that plan to the best of your ability.”

While making Nightwatch in the US, he met Del Toro who was about to make his US film debut and asked Laustsen to lens it. Mimic, a film about a plague of cockroaches invading Manhattan may not have been a runaway success but the pair have since made Crimson Tide, The Shape of Water and are currently prepping Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of a 1947 noir with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star.

Online Second Behind Pay TV as Europe’s Preferred Watch

Streaming Media

Audiences in Sweden, the UK, and Germany juggle multiple services to get all the video content they want, and they access those services across multiple devices.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/-Online-Second-Behind-Pay-TV-as-Europes-Preferred-Watch-131707.aspx

Whereas 12 years ago, when Netflix launched, most European homes relied on a single-source for TV, today nearly half of viewers in all three of the countries are multi-source television households.

That’s according to research undertaken by analyst nScreenMedia in a report sponsored by Nielsen-owned Gracenote.

The "TV Universe—U.K., Sweden, Germany: How People Watch Television Today" report looks at viewing habits around pay TV, free-to-air, and online TV.

Across the board, online TV is now the second most popular source behind pay TV with usage ranging from just under 40% in Germany to more than 50% in the UK and Sweden. The report calls this rise “remarkable” given the relative newcomer status of online.

Being Gracenote-sponsored research, there’s a focus on UI. Six in ten viewers indicated visual imagery and TV artwork displayed in the guides as important factors on their viewing choices. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, the number jumped up to around 90%. In addition, respondents said TV show and movie descriptions that shed light on content are also factors in their tune-in decision-making. 70% of U.K. viewers said the program descriptions were at least somewhat important. 65% of Swedes and 57% of Germans thought the same.

Other data from the report shows free-to-air TV is gaining traction on mobile. More free-to-air viewers use broadcaster apps to supplement viewing than pay TV viewers use their operator "TV Everywhere" apps. Over half of free-to-air users in each country use broadcaster apps.

The smart TV is the preferred device to watch video content on in all three countries. A significant 70% of total viewing time is on the TV screen in the UK and Germany, while in Sweden, the number clocks in at 60%.

The report also delves into viewing habits by market. Among the most surprising insights:

• 17% of the UK study group use all three TV sources available to them, higher than in Sweden and Germany.
• While the on-screen guide is the dominant way Swedes and Brits find content to watch, newspaper TV guides and channel flipping are the main ways for Germans.
• 31% of Swedes consider online TV to be their primary TV source, the highest of the three countries studied.

“The new TV Universe study shows that online TV has become the second most popular source of TV entertainment in a remarkably short period of time,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst at nScreenMedia. “Also telling is the fact that, though most online viewing takes place on the television, consumers don’t have the discovery tools they need to efficiently find something to watch there. Features such as voice and cross-service search are thinly used in each country. There is also plenty of room for improvement with content recommendations as a quarter or less think they accurately reflect their interests.”

APAC Ready for next-gen networks

InBroadcast

There is no doubt that 5G is under the spotlight now and the world’s tier-one operators are leading the race with large-scale field trials and aggressive commercial deployment progress. Operators’ decisions on when, where and how to deploy 5G are not only driven by the availability of spectrum, but also application scenarios, site solutions and business models.

http://europe.nxtbook.com/nxteu/lesommet/inbroadcast_201905/index.php#/24

In APAC, arguably the world’s most diverse telco region, operators are encountering all of these issues. World leaders in the move towards 5G and next generation fibre networks, such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, are neighbours (in the context of the massive APAC geography) of the poorest and least developed countries such as North Korea and Afghanistan.

In terms of pure speed, Singapore vies with Iceland as the world’s trail blazer. Singapore ranked fourth (behind Norway, Iceland and Qatar) with the fastest mean download speeds over mobile in the 12 months from December 2017 – November 2018 at (54.71 Mbps) according to Ookla’ Speedtest. The nation-state trumped all others in recording mean download speeds over fixed broadband of 175.13 Mbps. Next fastest were Iceland (153.03 Mbps), Hong Kong (138.31 Mbps) and South Korea (114.67 Mbps).

At the other end of the spectrum markets such as China, Indonesia and Myanmar have seen their previously strong growth stagnate due to the challenges of connecting those still unconnected, particularly poorer and rural communities. The digital divide is greatest in markets such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where 70–80 percent of the population are not yet online.

This does, however, leave room for growth; penetration levels across South Asia will rise from the 50 percent average to 61 percent by 2025, according to mobile operator’s body GSMA. By end of this year, mobile broadband will account for 93 percent of total connections across the region, with 2G all but obsolete in over half of APAC markets.

Asia continues to be the dominant player globally in the fibre broadband market too, with ResearchandMarkets.com identifying South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, as world leaders in this regard.

Intense competition, a techno-literate culture and favourable regulatory environments have helped drive a rapid migration to fast mobile and fixed broadband networks over recent years but facing rising customer expectations in saturated markets, operators are now looking to pioneer services in the gigabit era.

East Asia, for instance, is home to some of the most penetrated mobile markets in the world (such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea), with minimal opportunity for further subscriber growth, [per GSMA]. On average across East Asia, 81% of the population subscribe to mobile services; this will increase by just three percentage points between 2017 and 2025.

To reach the ‘Gigatopia’, as coined by Korea Telecom’s Jeong Hyeong Lee, operators must rollout an intelligent network based on Gigaspeed internet, GigaWi-Fi and 5G. China Telecom, for example, which has 255 million mobile and 135 million fixed broadband customers, expects the volume of data traffic on its network to grow eleven-fold between 2018 and 2025 as a growing number of customers use 4G and ultimately 5G mobile broadband services and FTTH uptake grows.

For many operators the rollout of 5G cannot come a moment too soon. The promise of network slicing, which creates multiple logical partitions within resource allocations are designed to address specific use cases ranging from self-driving cars to IoT devices.

The Asia Pacific as a whole is on track to become the world’s largest 5G region by 2025, led by Japan and South Korea (with Australia and China not far behind), according to the GSMA’s latest report.

The first 5G launches in South Korea, Japan and Singapore are expected to focus on enhanced mobile broadband services, supplementing the capacity and capabilities of existing networks, particularly in dense urban areas. However, 5G’s next phase will lay the foundation to support a range of future use cases and innovations, including massive connectivity and low-latency services such as critical communication services (e.g. remote surgery, smart grids) and virtual reality.

“This is the ground floor of 5G,” noted Pete Lau, CEO of Chinese handset brand OnePlus at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this spring. “The first phase will be characterised by an evident increase in speed and new cloud functionality. 2021 to 2025 will see 5G, Cloud and AI enabling a whole new level of smart functionality in our lives. Then from 2025-2030 the age of internet of things will be unleashed.”

Next summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be a showcase for 5G technologies including for use in multi-camera video contribution links and 8K virtual reality – planned as live streamed by telco NTT Docomo.

The International Olympic committee has partnered with Alibaba to envelop the Tokyo’s games venues Alibaba’s cloud. “This will transform the Olympics for fans, venues and athletes,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.

There is wide industry consensus that the biggest piece of the 5G pie will not be consumer but in industrial and enterprise applications like mining, private healthcare or the military: those with the cash to spare for the premium of millisecond precision engineering and tailored algorithms.

“For us, the 5G business case stacks up,” Andy Penn, CEO at Telstra said at MWC2019. “It makes more sense for me to invest in 5G for the enterprise. Those use cases are starting to become clearer but how we package the solution for customers is a trickier issue.”

While the conversation tends to focus on 5G, the near-realisation of this long anticipated network upgrade hasn’t come alone. It is the combination of 5G with AI, Cloud and the IoT which have all come to maturity at the same time which isbehind a new wave of computing. In different combinations this will unleash incredible compute power in our personal devices and unlock patterns in data that humans just can’t see. Together these technologies will transform how we live, work and play. The GSMA characterises this as the era of Intelligent Connectivity.

Scaling for IoT

Already the world’s largest IoT market, APAC is expected to account for 11 billion connections and $386 billion in revenue by 2025, according to GSMA Intelligence. Mobile operators SingTel, M1, Maxis, Optus and Celcom together with consultants, manufacturers and systems integrators from across Asia have joined the GSMA’s IoT Programme.

“This programme will support the development of the IoT by creating a cross-regional community to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing,” explains Julian Gorman, Head of APAC, GSMA.

The Labs will be available to partners in markets including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

“The aim is to accelerate the deployment of innovative IoT use cases that will improve the lives of over 3 billion people across the Asia Pacific region,” adds Gorman.

For example, in Sri Lanka, Dialog Axiata has a commercial mobile IoT network, supporting LTE and NB-IoT (NarrowBand) technologies, in partnership with Ericsson. It also partnered with Orange Electric, a manufacturer of electrical and lighting products in Sri Lanka, to launch the Orange Electric Smart Socket for the connected home market.

As M2M communication helps optimise and automate everything from urban planning to critical weather warnings, telcos are arguably in prime position to unlock growth from this emerging technology. For example, more than 500 cities in China are using Huawei’s NB-IoT network gear in smart city deployments. Chinese city Yingtan is saving 2 million tonnes of water a year after deploying 2 million smart water meters to reduce leakage.

Automated networks

The billions of internet connections predicted by the mid-2020’s should translate to enormous profits for carriers, but with the downward pressure on revenues globally, these profits will only be recognized by operators that learn to run their business more efficiently. Trying to manage that number of connections manually is costly, and operators who fall behind in automation will see all their profits consumed by higher OPEX costs.

The cost of rolling out and implementing 5G across all sectors of the economy globally is expected to reach at least $2.7 trillion by the end of 2020, according to research from finance house Greensill.

Huawei alone has invested more than $15 billion in technology and claims, with some justification to be the first company able to deploy 5G networks at scale, to deliver 14Gbps per 5G sector and boost 5G speeds using fibre up to 200Gbps - four times greater than any competitor.

“While the industry’s networks are 21st century, the network operation and maintenance is still in the 18th century,” said Chairman Guo Ping. “Globally, 70% of network faults are from human limitations.”

AI has the potential to change this and create autonomous networks that are responsive, self-healing and self-optimizing. Huawei is using AI embedded in its chips to build intelligent networks that would, among other things, reduce network issues and reduce power costs for carriers.

Increased complexity in networking and the need to scale is driving the need for increased network automation and agility. “It’s not just about putting 200-400G into the network but about the programmability of the network,” says Bob Everson, Cisco’s Global Director of Mobility. “In particular, the use of machine learning to make things like network management a bit easier. We’re a long way from self-healing networks but that is the ultimate plan which is why the focus for much of the optical industry is on software.”

E-commerce operator Rakuten plans to roll out Japan’s first new mobile network in a decade and will do using greenfield technology that it claims will see it leapfrog rivals. Its radio access will be completely virtualised and running as VNF (virtual network functions) on a private cloud enables Rakuten to deploy new services rapidly.

“We aim to not only disrupt Japan’s telco industry, we want to revolutionise mobile networks worldwide,” CTO Tareq Amin said.

Government regulation

The impact of government regulation on driving internet equality and giga-speed connectivity is critical. Some recognise superfast broadband is a pre-requisite to entering the fourth industrial revolution.

Australia’s attempt to expand fibre rollout and increase and usage speed appear to be working, according to recent reports.

“We’re now seeing benefit that high speed broadband brings to everyone in Australia,” says JB Rousselot, chief strategy officer at NBN, the public body tasked with driving the initiative. “We started roll out in rural areas and we’ve recently seen the tangible economic benefits that this brings to connecting the whole of the country not just dense urban areas.”

NBN predict that its broadband infrastructure deployment by 2021 will have added AUS$10.4 billion (US$7.36 bn) to the economy and 31,000 jobs. Other indicators in its Connecting Australia 2018 report show that video streaming isdriving data consumption, with the average home user now consuming 213 GB per month. It has connected 4.4m customers to the network and is on track, it says, to reach 8 million by 2020.

This approach still pales besides that of New Zealand where fibre connectivity reaches 70 percent of the population with a target of 87 percent attainable by 2022. Speeds range from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Kate McKenzie, CEO at communications infrastructure provider Chorus says there are global lessons to be learned from the open access, wholesale only, shared infrastructure model employed in New Zealand. “This has meant investing once in the national infrastructure, without wasteful duplication, allowing us to deliver congestion free fibre to the home to nearly 90% of the population,” she says.

Spark, the former encumbent and one-time parent of Chorus scooped Sky NZ to rights to this summer’s Rugby World Cup (the sport is virtually a religion in NZ as McKenzie points out), with most matches available for streaming only. She says it will be a major test of Chorus’ ability to deliver concurrent HD streams at peak to a huge national audience exclusively over broadband.

“Culture is more important than strategy for rollout,” argues McKenzie. “If you aren’t customer focussed and you are change resistant then it will be really tough to make next-gen models sustainable. It’s also good to have a bit of competition in the market to keep you on your toes.”