As Asia scales up its broadband infrastructure, economies in the region need to ensure their next-generation networks are capable of providing multiple services and lower total cost of ownership for service providers.
The network revolves around services but no one can say for sure what the next big thing will be, Kim Perdikou, executive vice president, service provider business at Juniper Networks, told ZDNet Asia in an interview Tuesday, during a business trip to Singapore.
"We don't know what next year's 'Facebook' will be; we don't know what next year's YouTube will be," said Perdikou. "You need to build a network that when the new Facebook comes out, you can actually run that on the network you build last year."
Ensuring that the broadband infrastructure is multi-service capable is something that countries such as Singapore, are trying to do by seeking input from the industry, she noted. The Singapore government's next-generation National Broadband Network promises to provide ultra high speed Internet access for both work and play.
One dimension toward future-proof infrastructure, according to Perdikou, is having open standards. Having open infrastructure will ensure that any handheld device can be used to access the network, and also allows for differentiated services through application programming interfaces (APIs).
Opening up the network can in fact spur "innovation in a whole lot of industries", said Perdikou. For example, she pointed out the healthcare industry has "incredible ideas" about what can be done with a handheld device to monitor patients, which would not be able to tap on past networks that communicate with specific devices.
According to Perdikou, the desire to keep network operating expenses to a minimum is also driving many Asian countries toward "different architecture".
A study separately released Tuesday by Informa Telecoms & Media also revealed that service providers will face cost pressures as a result of the inability of mobile data revenues to match the explosion of mobile data traffic.
Informa said in a statement that the volume of mobile data traffic worldwide will leap by 1,088 percent between 2007 and 2012. Global mobile traffic from YouTube and other mobile video streaming applications, in particular, will increase by 5,514 percent by 2012.
However, global mobile data revenues will only increase 77 percent during the same period.
"This will push current mobile network costs and architectures to the breaking point, and will lead to everything from network sharing and spectrum refarming to the launch of femtocells and next-generation networks," said Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa and author of the report.
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