"Today's networks are not up to it" says Ericsson's Wibergh

Current networks are not up to the challenge of meeting the pressure of the future networked society and will need to be replaced, Johan Wibergh, executive vice president and head of business unit networks at Ericsson has said.

Wibergh, making his comments at the opening keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum in Paris, said that Ericsson expects up to 50 billion devices to be connected to the internet by 2020 and that it would be necessary to move to a fourth generation network to be able to deliver the services required.

“Today’s networks are not up to it, they won’t scale. We will need to move to fourth generation of IP networks.”

Wibergh said that the 4GIP network, as he described it, will have to seamlessly integrate between HSPA, LTE and wifi and be much simpler in its architecture.  He stated that the emphasis will need to be on lowering the cost per bit in order to enable the network to scale. “We need to bring the internet to five billion people and it won’t happen unless we simplify things,” he said.

He also noted that networks would have to realise the potential of cloud services. “There are enormous possibilities around cloud, but it’s not easy to get working—this is the task we have ahead of us in the coming years.”

broadband-zone-tag

More Content Like This In The Broadband Zone