Broadband benefits society and other industries, such as tourism, education, health and hospitality, while also empowering different industries on different geographic, cultural and social terrains, according to a network solutions expert.

“The evolution of broadband keeps people closer to information. Because broadband is widespread enough and becoming more affordable, we are witnessing an enormous upward growth trend in broadband subscribers,” said Jeremy Foster, marketing director, Ericsson ME.

Ericsson, leading provider of network solutions to telecom operators, showcased its ‘intelligent city’ applications such as Internet protocol TV and edge routing at the recently concluded Broadband Summit.

The two-day summit, organised by Informa, opened on March 10 at Dubai Festival City.

Broadband creates sustainable business opportunities for operators that, in turn deliver so much value to these industries. E-education in Africa is one such instance of providing information to people which in other ways might be impossible for them to get access to, Foster said.

He added that in the past few years the focus in the Gulf markets has been on diversification from the petrochemical industry. He said that a big part of what broadband delivers is not just content for people but is also taking innovation and ideas beyond oil producing to innovating other areas.

“In the Middle East, there is a lot of culture, experience and knowledge in the unique way the countries in the region look at the world. The world can benefit from it. But at the moment, the chances are less so because broadband is not so wide-spread as it could be,” he said.

The import of broadband could be the key to becoming more competitive on the global marketplace, be it in the GCC, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq; thus enabling these markets to share information among themselves.

Amidst the tremendous growth of broadband subscribers, the enormous demand on the local networks to deliver the information faster is one of the challenges that operators worldwide will face.

“Industry forecast are showing that operators are going to run out of capacity eventually on the mobile side, Long Term Evolution (LTE) will dramatically help here” Foster said.

Moreover, LTE creates incentives for operators to boost the speed of the end-user experience, the capacity and the number of end-users.

Like the leading vendor in Long Term Evolution (LTE) that offers bit-rate of over 150 Mbps in mobile networks, Ericsson was also the first company to demonstrate gigabit passive optical network (GPON) with 10 Gbps capacity in the wireline field.

The need for speed remains unchallenged in the current financial slowdown that has taken the world economy when operators could save time and money for their clients. – TradeArabia News Service