@ PCIA: Ericsson expounds on connected lifestyle

HOLLYWOOD, Fla.—In 2020, people will live in intelligent homes, connect with a digital lifestyle that allows us to be more productive, more efficient, and have better lives, said Magnus Ojert, VP of deployment and operations at Ericsson. Ojert painted Ericsson’s vision of a connected world during the PCIA’s Infrastructure Show 2010, and how it would impact people’s lifestyles far beyond the network.
Ericsson believes that 50 billion “things” will be connected wirelessly by 2020, a tenfold increase from the 5 billion broadband connections in place today. Ojert gave a couple of examples contrasting how personal experiences will change once these connections are in place. Today, if the air-conditioning goes out on the Fourth of July and a family is planning a barbeque, the day is spent finding a technician who services your type of air conditioning unit, seeing if replacement parts are in the existing inventory and scheduling an appointment with the technician to fix the unit. In the future, Ojert said the intelligent home will run a regular checkup to see how different devices inside the home are operating, recommend services to be performed, find technicians to perform the task and the associated price that should be charged for the task, and coordinate schedules to set up the appointment.
Likewise, Ojert talked about the “digital breakfast,” where the “only thing that will be real at the table will be the breakfast,” as the parent reads a digital paper and a child conducts digital homework at the table. Sick kids can connect to schools remotely to get homework assignments and the like. “Think what this will mean to Third World Countries.”
Behind all of this is a powerful network, and a changing network, Ojert said. “Twenty years ago, networks drove the devices and app development,” but there weren’t any apps to speak of. Going forward, “today devices and applications are driving networks.”
Today, the industry is on the cusp of a broadband evolution, where it moves beyond the point of merely establishing the market, setting standards and such, to one that is beginning to offer differentiating services. As operators move toward tiered pricing plans, they will be able to match how their customers use network resources with revenues. Ojert said operators with the best networks should be able to charge end users the most; people who want a less-expensive price point may be willing to put up with a little less quality. The third wave of evolution is a bit more futuristic, a la the digital breakfast, but will have every type of equipment that can benefit from being connected be connected. The questions for industry then are around provisioning, managing and billing for that connectivity.