TORONTO – The industry must harden its wireless and broadband networks in Canada because good enough isn’t good enough anymore, a top Telus executive told Canadian Telecom Summit delegates this week.
“It was only 30 years ago that we deployed our first cellular networks in this country and about 25 years ago the internet, as we know it… were deployed,” said Telus chief technology officer Eros Spadotto. “At the time, these networks were the bleeding edge of technology, but perhaps ironically, they were deployed on a ‘best efforts basis.” That is, connectivity was not guaranteed.
Calls were (and still are) dropped and packets were lost. However, they were new and exciting ways of communicating and everyone accepted those problems. With the ever-increasing expectation of flawless connectivity supporting high definition video and even more critical applications like real-time health care, however, the industry’s “best efforts” must improve.
“The industry has grown from a ‘best efforts’ to an ‘almost guaranteed’ delivery,” Spadotto added. “I say ‘almost guaranteed’ in that every once in a while we hear something that tells us we have more work to do.”
That work must lead to the “industrialization of the internet,” he explained, which means always-on, never down communications – no matter what happens. It’s a term Spadotto explained he borrowed from GE CEO Jeff Immelt. (What this sounds like is almost a return to is the old five-nines standard of telecommunications, where it was said dial tone was found on every phone in a network 99.999% of the time.)
“The failure to provide a reliable, secure, fast connection means we do not get our Industrial Internet,” added Spadotto.
Those hardened, multiplied, connections to more devices than there are people, eventually, will come from deploying all the spectrum the company has purchased recently, as well as newer technologies to fill any and all gaps – and don’t forget about that historical, necessary, wired, backbone. “We are actively developing the heterogeneous wireless network, or HetNet, with GigaSites at the macro level underlaid by thousands of Microcells and soon to be joined by tens of thousands of PicoCells,” he explained.
“Perhaps it’s obvious to all of us, perhaps not, but for many users the wireless connection is the last 50 feet of connectivity. Wireless may be the ‘sexy’ thing to talk about, but it is the fixed or wireline network that makes wireless possible.
“Our endgame is to deliver an Industrial Internet that provides us with solutions that haven’t even been thought of yet… that will change how business is done… and how Canadians live, work and play.”
