Salience was featured at a high-level fire chat at the FCGA Summit in Dubai, hosted by Fiber Connect Council MENA.
We were eager to learn about the fibre deployment progress in various continents and the initiatives to continue the pace of deployment in less urban communities, as well as the technological changes to replace earlier GPONs with higher speed standards and more symmetrical deployments. AI was also mentioned as a disruptor with more asymmetric data requirements towards end users, as well as the need for more (and more reliable) fibre for Data Centre to Data Centre links.
Ivan Skenderoski, Managing Partner and CEO of Salience Consulting, alongside Dr. Mohannad Y. Salam from AtkinsRéalis, participated in a fireside chat on Smart City / Mega City initiatives and lessons learned from the Middle East. The discussion emphasized on number of challenges, including:
1. Challenges related to estimating broadband capacity demand within the city and connecting the cities for the applications and the use cases in play (how do you estimate the data needed to do e-gaming competition 10 years from now?)
2. The need for open networks and open data platforms enabling smart cities. The open access networks concept needs to stretch from traditional fixed wholesale networks to mobile deployments (including shared antennas) and subsea cables (shared sea bed landing corridors for the cables and “digital ports” linked with the landing stations).
Open data needs to be protected but made available for use rather than proprietary and used for a single purpose.
3. Regulatory challenges on standardizing smart city infrastructure and the needed alignment with the funding and investment priorities related to far city funding should stretch vs the investments from the private telecom operators.
4. Extending fibre/network security from cybersecurity to physical security and making fiber networks and related infrastructure more resilient to natural disasters.