Building Strong Mobile Broadband,Enabling the Next Industrial Revolution
Ken Hu's Speech at the Broader Way Broadband Forum at MWC 2014
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good afternoon. On behalf of Huawei, I'd like to extend the warmest welcome to all of you for attending the Broader Way Forum.
We are very glad to host this forum at the Mobile World Congress. The theme of this year’s Mobile World Congress is “Creating what’s next,” and it actually raises a great question for all of us. “What is the next big thing?” I believe the next big thing is a new industrial revolution, a revolution driven by ICT.
We see several key characteristics in this new industrial revolution.
First, ICT continues to drive the deep convergence of the digital and physical worlds. It is no longer just a tool to improve efficiency, but an enabler and a catalyst for the transformation of all industries. From education to transportation, everything around us will be new.
Second, ICT infrastructure is becoming as vital as electricity and roads to our society, and the level of ICT infrastructure development directly determines competitiveness of a country or an economy.
Third, but most important, utilization of the Internet and ICT have become fundamental to the business mindset, requiring us to put customers at the center of all business elements, and focus on customer experience in a way we never did before. Thanks to this new mindset, traditional sectors such as education, transportation, and banking service have been given new life.
In this new industrial revolution, mobile broadband, as a key infrastructure, will play an absolutely critical role. However, even with the global deployment of mobile broadband as of today, we still face many challenges and difficulties, especially in terms of the investment model, end-to-end costs, and collaboration across industries.
First, we need to promote a healthier investment model that makes MBB development more attractive to operators. Over the last two decades, great progresses have been made in privatizing the telecom industry and protecting consumer interests around the world. Today, regulations should focus more on balancing investor interests with consumer interests. Additionally, the value chain has changed remarkably in today’s digital society. Regulations should encourage more reasonable value distribution and cost sharing among infrastructure operators, content providers, and consumers.
The second challenge we face is how to reduce the end-to-end cost of building and operating MBB networks. We believe there are three key areas that significantly impact the cost of network.
Spectrum cost is the first and foremost. Currently, spectrum cost represents a significant portion of the entire mobile infrastructure investment. In some countries, it can even be more than 20%. This definitely deters investors from building new mobile networks, thus hindering market competition. Additionally, regional differences in spectrum utilization add another layer of cost. For example, the US and Asia-Pacific today have different bandwidth usage models for 700MHz, and this divergence is costly. We therefore urge countries and governments to create a healthier spectrum allocation mechanism to reduce the cost of spectrum acquisition. We would also like to see, regulators further improve spectrum utilization, through better standardization processes that further reduce the cost of spectrum to carriers.
Secondly, site acquisition and civil engineering are significant cost components in MBB deployment. Sharing of civil engineering such as duct, tower and power lines can reduce the cost significantly. Governments, international organizations, and industries need to collaborate better, and develop more reasonable policies and standards to promote cross-industry collaboration and reduce cost.
Thirdly, we must continue the innovation in network equipment and solution to drive down the total cost. For example, SingleRAN solution which is able to accommodate 2G, 3G and 4G technologies on the same platform can reduce CAPEX and OPEX significantly. New technologies such as multi spectrum aggregation and bandwidth compression give us the flexibility to make the best out of the spectrum resource. What’s more, SDN, software-defined network will allow us to automatically provision services and balance traffic loads more efficiently, reducing CAPEX and OPEX even further.
To summarize, we need to address the challenge of driving down the end-to-end cost of mobile broadband through better spectrum allocation and utilization , civil infrastructure sharing, and technological innovation.
The third major challenge to MBB development is the cross-industry collaboration and broader application of the technology itself. To fully unleash the potential of mobile Internet where we are “all connected at zero distance,” traditional vertical industries must transform themselves and collaborate with other industries. What’s more, development of the industry value chain requires collaboration among the device, network and cloud. We believe that affordable devices, and a wide variety of applications for individuals, households and enterprises, will not only be the driving force behind broadband network development, but also the purpose of it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you are all just as excited as we are to be part of this industrial revolution, driven by mobile Internet and MBB. It has been a real honor for Huawei to be an enabler of this industrial revolution. As always, we will continue our efforts in technological innovation and open cooperation, to leverage our capabilities across the industry, contribute our knowledge and global experiences, thereby better connecting the world, constantly enabling social progress, and enriching people's lives.
Again, ladies and gentleman, I welcome all of you to Barcelona. I wish the forum a great success! Thank you!
