doteditorial May 2017

Welcome to the fourth issue of dotmagazine, where we focus on networks and connectivity, and related issues like access and reachability. 

The economic impact of connectivity is a major topic running through many of the features and industry insights this month. As Independent Consultant Gerd Simon tells us, digital transformation will lead to growth, not decline, in employment, and has a direct impact on GDP growth even during the initial investment period. The metropolitan centers of today and tomorrow will push both international connectivity and economic growth. Both Jukka-Pekka Joensuu from the Cinia Group and Alex Nam from CDNetworks look at the economic impact of the Chinese market, and the consequences for international companies wanting to do business there – having websites that load quickly, low latency connections, and even as the Analysys Mason study into the Universal Acceptance of Domain Names – having systems that recognize non-Latin scripts can have a major influence on the bottom line.

But Asia is not the only area of interest for networks and enterprises, as the needs for connectivity in the massively growing African market also become increasingly important. Broadgroup’s Gregory Gerot looks at the potential for growth in the region and the importance of investment there, while Theresa Bobis from DE-CIX describes the growth in traffic from the African continent to Europe and beyond, via the undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea. And just exactly how does our data  get in and through these networks is a question answered by DE-CIX Academy’s Wolfgang Tremmel in his lay-man’s guide to Internet routing, “The Journey of a Data Packet”.

And what are the drivers of the traffic flows that are lighting up networks under the oceans and in more and more regions around the world? One clear case at the moment is streaming media. In this issue eco’s Klaus Landefeld, together with Dr Stefan Lietsch (Zattoo), Steve Bisenius (SES), Jürgen Sewczyk (German TV-Platform) and Dr Thomas King (DE-CIX), looks at the trends and innovations in the area of live broadcasting of international sporting events across both terrestrial and satellite networks. These experts also take a look at solutions to meet tomorrow’s connectivity needs, in the white paper “Infrastructure for Live Broadcasting – State of Play and Future Challenges”. 

Looking at the more regional level, broadband roll-out, with Fiber to the Home/Business (FTTH/B), is the fundamental enabler of our future digital society, as eco’s Nico Goss points out – there is currently no foreseeable upper limit to accessibility requirements: the more broadband customers have, the more they will use.

But networks and connectivity are about more than only wealth and value generation, as Gerhard Betscheider from SES and Alexander James Thomas from Télécoms Sans Frontières both show in their descriptions of the vital role of telecommunications in emergency situations and crisis zones. Networks are about connecting people in fundamental and vital ways. And, as always, we must keep security in mind – of both legacy infrastructure and new roll-outs, as Dr. Dan Tofan, from the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) reminds us.

And coming back to Gerd Simon, investing in creating that connectivity is only the beginning of the transformation to a digital society – “we need to train and we need to empower the people to understand how to use it and how to get the benefits out of it.” That’s when we see true value creation.