Coronavirus and Global Tech Events

3 minute read

The world has faced yet another massive threat to the mankind in the recent history – Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Although the initial impact was mainly on China, now it has become a global threat as the virus has speared outside the Great Wall. The situation has created much concerns for all the countries and governments in the world.

Not like in the past, with the development of new technologies, we say that the world has become a global village, making everyone close to each other, not just using communication, but also making global travel easy. As a result, people travel more for different reasons.  Global events, especially the ones related to technology and telecoms are held in numbers around the globe all across the year. These include global events and regional events. 

While the coronavirus’s impact to the world is multi-fold, one of the areas relevant to the telecom and tech are the global events. There are many organizations in the world organizing annual and regional events and these events are important for the right balance of the ecosystem. Some key examples are GSMA, PTC, Terrapinn, Layer123, Informatech, Linux Foundation, MEF and TM Forum. These organizations produce many flagship events including Mobile World Congress (MWC)-Barcelona, MWC-Shanghai, Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC), Telecoms World, Next Generation Optical Networking & Data Center Interconnect (NGON & DCI) World, Broadband World Forum (BBWF), Network Virtualization, Open Source Summit (OSS) and Digital Transformation World (DTW).

Even though today's technologies and advancements in communications does not require us really travel to discuss and share knowledge, these events over the years have proved that the industry still like to meet in person at least once a year – for many reasons. This requires travel – mostly on air. One of the hardly hit industries with coronavirus is the travel industry. For example, take Singapore – a main travel hubs in the world and according to this report, it was empty few days back. Airports and airplanes, no matter how good you keep them hygienic and clean, are susceptible for the spread of the virus. Many people have cancelled their travels and many organizations have imposed travel bans for their employees. 

As a result, many global tech events have been cancelled or postponed, biggest news being the cancellation of the MWC 2020 – an event started in 2006. Another example is Telecoms World Asia 2020. Going forward, we may see many other events too will be either postponed or cancelled. After all, we all agree that the safety of everyone is paramount. 

As already mentioned, we can use technology like remote meetings, webinars, virtual reality, holograms etc., but they won’t be that effective compared to the overall experience you get in attending an event physically. While the world goes dark, the telecom and tech events landscape will also be dark, hopefully temporally. Till then let’s be patient and keep the industry moving.

Anuradha Udunuwara, ARC Tube | @AnuradhaU

Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash

Have we taken computing, bit storage and bit transport for granted?

Estimated Read Time: 2 min

If you over heard the terms IoT (internet of Things), AI (Artificial intelligence), VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), AV (Autonomous Vehicles) and many others alike, during the past couple of years, especially in the beautiful city of Barcelona - if you happened to be at MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2019, then you’re not the only one. Celicitaciones! (On a different note, I also thought to myself that the abbreviations are also becoming shorter – 2 letters instead of 3 /4 letters).

All of a sudden, the terms we used to hear and discuss often – like IP (Internet Protocol), Ethernet, MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) - in the Telecom industry have been replaced by a set of more sexy terms like IoT, AI, VR, AR, AV, etc. These new techs have also broken the boundaries of traditional Telco industry and many cross disciplines – like medical, education, transportation, trading, finance, etc.- have been interconnected like never before.

But, one thing that most of the new technologies seems to be taken for granted is the presence of readily available underlying infrastructure, mainly consist of computing, bit storage and bit transport. These are the three fundamental tasks we have been doing in the entire history of ICT (Information and Communications Technology). No doubt that these three areas have also been improved and matured over the years and today we have super computers capable of super-fast computing, DCs (Data Centers) with massive capacities and networks with Terabit bandwidths.

However, as IoT, AI, VR, AR, AV, etc, are commoditizing and commercializing in a rapid pace than we thought, can we simply take the infrastructure for granted? The size and shape of different vectors like scale, capacity, responsiveness, etc. on the infrastructure to support the requirements of overlay services/applications might suddenly create catastrophes, if we do not prepare ourselves today. It’s a good sign that we now see, at least in small scale, some discussions happen across these areas. Don’t be surprised the next time you go to an optical conference, and you hear someone talking about VR/AR.

What is required is a more collaborated discussion and research to view and address the total requirement as a whole, making sure to include all the stakeholders. These stakeholders surely will not come entirely from telecom domain, but from different other domains we never have thought of.

Author: Anuradha Udunuwara, ARC Tube | @AnuradhaU

Note: The 1^st version of this blog was originally appeared in Anuradha Udunuwara’s personal blog.
http://audunuwara.blogspot.com/2017/03/have-we-taken-computing-bit-storage-and.html