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E book 12 -2017 dated 26 Sept 2017

From a blog dedicated to provide Strategic Insights for Telcos and CSP's

Blog Source : www.maliksadiq13.wordpress.com

Table of Contents

About Sadiq Malik ( Telco Strategist )

1 Blockchain for Telcos : Full Steam ahead 2 Robots and Telcos : 3CPO and R2D2 reporting for duty 3 Industrie 4.0 and Telcos : Deutschland der Reisefuhrer 4 AI and Telcos : made for each other 5 Big Data : Corral Hadoop and Apache Shark 6 Hot in 2016 and getting hotter in 2017 7 Smart Cities : strategic insights 8 Blockchain Phenomena : More disruptive than you think

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About

Sadiq Malik is Principal Consultant at Broadband Gurus Network which provides a portfolio of consultancy services to address the ongoing business challenges faced by organisations throughout the telecoms value chain.

Broadband Gurus Network , a think tank that is focused on helping Telcos and Government Regulators on how best to monetize broadband in the pursuit of bridging the Digital Divide in Developing countries.

At Informa Telecoms Media’s Middle East & Africa region Sadiq spearheaded the design and delivery of consultancy packages to help telcos and CSPs succeed in a fast evolving market landscape with alternative business models . At BCT Global, Sadiq led the formation of the telco services division where he secured contracts concerning a range of innovative services in the broadband arena.

As strategic projects consultant for Motorola, he initiated projects with a long-term impact on the company’s intellectual and brand competitiveness such as the establishment of Africa’s first cellular training centre.Sadiq has managed several key projects for Telcos / CSP’s including: LTE Business Planning; Fixed Mobile Operator Consolidation assessment; monetising VAS strategic planning and Smart Cities Evolution (technical and commercial planning).

Sadiq is speaker at telco conferences and conducts CxO workshops for CSP’s in Germany , Singapore , Holland , Malaysia , Dubai, Cairo and Johanesburg. Some of the workshop themes : BSS/OSS transformation , Hybrid Broadband Architectures , LTE and 5 G Technical and commercial aspects , Telco 2 business models , Mobile network optimisation and Capacity planning , Business case build up for IOT , SDN/NFV and Telco Blockchain.

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1: Blockchain for Telcos : Full Steam ahead

A complex technology anchored in a powerful, simple idea, blockchain is fast gaining traction as the next big innovation in secure connectivity. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed database, which means that instead of your database existing on a single server system, copies of each new piece of data are sent out to all users involved in the ‘chain’ or network. Any service which requires a method to systematically record an event (such as ownership transfer, contract agreement, contract realisation etc.) could potentially benefit from blockchain.

According to a report by Deloitte Germany, the telecom industry will see a huge impact of Blockchain in upcoming years. Precisely offering new solutions for fraud management, Identity-as-a-Service and data management, enablement of 5G and building secure IoT connectivity. 5G technology implementation is a prime example to potentially benefit from the blockchain to streamline processes. To realize the 5G promise of ubiquitous access across various networks, CSPs will need to handle heterogeneous access nodes and diverse access mechanisms. Selecting the fastest access node for every user or machine will be a central challenge in the future. Blockchain can enable a new generation of access technology selection mechanisms to build sustainable solutions.

A number of telcos are already adopting this technology in order to gain a foot hold ahead of competition. As of February this year, Sprint, Du, Testra and Orange to name a few, all have projects in motion with some dating back to 2015. US telecom Sprint is working on a new blockchain initiative focused on carrier applications.The firm is partnering with SoftBank, a Japanese telecom conglomerate, and TBCASoft, Inc., a blockchain startup based in California. For now, it appears the partnership is still in its early stages, as the three companies said today that joint trials will begin soon, on leveraging a platform developed by TBCASoft to connect the telecom’s systems together.

There is quite a bit of excitement about having digital rights on a blockchain-type system. It could allow for pay-per-usage, for example, while smart contracts — the contractual clauses that form part of a transaction — could provide automatic

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payment distributions, according to a Moody’s Investors Service report. So Verizon filed a recent patent for a passcode blockchain. The patent relates to digital content — think an e-book or a digital-music or video file. The patent filing states “The DRM (digital rights management) system may maintain a list of passcodes in a passcode blockchain. …”. A passcode blockchain is a decentralized platform designed specifically for data-driven companies like Verizon to deal with sensitive data that are leveraged to carry out core operations.

On a wider scale, this technology could usher in micro-transactions for viewing content as an alternative to models like permanent purchase or advertising revenue, allowing creators to be paid directly by consumers, who can in turn, due to the low prices, get the content they want without ads or hangups in exchange for paying a relatively low cost. This could also allow things like drop-in drop-out rentals of real time online games, akin to sticking a quarter into an arcade cabinet, except that cabinet is connected to a living, breathing online world, for example.

Blockchain is believed to offer an effective and sustainable tool for fraud prevention, especially in roaming and in subscription identity management. Roaming fraud, which occurs through individuals actively avoiding payment for use of roaming services, is made possible due to delays in time between individuals accessing the mobile network (Visited Public Mobile Network) when roaming and that data being passed to the subscriber’s telecom provider (Host Mobile Public Network) in order for them to bill the relevant charge.

This delay allows perpetrators to avoid payment due to billing time delay. Blockchain in this scenario would set up a micro contract with network users requiring permission from relevant HPMN and VPMN parties to enable roaming. This would be constantly sending data from the individual user to their subscribed network provider, allowing immediate calculation and charges to take place.

One critical aspect of any modern, digital service is finding the right balance between convenience and security. Security in the blockchain is upheld with public and private keys. In a digital world without tangible, in person interactions, establishing trust and ownership may be difficult. This is where the blockchain comes into play. Blockchain technology allows individuals, independent of each other, to rely on the same shared, secure and auditable source of information for managing identity.

According to Gartner, by 2020, there will be more than 20 billion connected things across the globe, powering a market that will be worth north of $3 trillion. But the chaotic growth of IoT will introduce several challenges, including identifying, connecting, securing, and managing so many devices. It will be very challenging for the current infrastructure and architecture underlying the Internet and online services to support huge IoT ecosystems of the future.

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Blockchain will enable IoT ecosystems to break from the traditional broker-based networking paradigm, where devices rely on a central cloud server to identify and authenticate individual devices. Blockchain technology will enable the creation of secure mesh networks, where IoT devices will interconnect in a reliable way while avoiding threats such as device spoofing and impersonation.

Telstra is another Telco leveraging blockchain technology to secure smart home IoT ecosystems. Cryptographic hashes of device firmware are stored on a private blockchain to minimize verification time and obtain real-time tamper resistance and tamper detection.Since most smart home devices are controlled through mobile apps, Telstra further expands the model and adds user biometric information to the blockchain hashes in order to tie in user identity and prevent compromised mobile devices from taking over the network. This way, the blockchain will be able to verify both the identity of IoT devices and the identity of the people interacting with those devices.

Telstra is also experimenting with using blockchain for legal interception, environmental sensor monitoring, car safety, agriculture, network operations, fraud, compliance and audit, and e-voting. The emergence of crypto currencies on the technology known as blockchain have highlighted opportunities to repurpose that technology to capture various digital transactions in immutable, distributed and secure ways. One more notably futuristic use of blockchain relates to the booming machine learning-based field of behavioural analytics, a discipline that hinges on tracking normal organisational behaviour and flagging anomalies. This use of blockchain will give insight into behaviours which are outside the norm.

Of course Blockchain may not be the Holy Grail in hand right now. One can think that the replication of databases and validation by consensus are computing power-intensive. Since a blockchain retains all historical data, the size of an established blockchain at each node might become unsustainable. Instead, a mechanism to archive historical data needs to be looked at. But the main challenge is likely to be the maturity of the ecosystem and supporting infrastructure? Clear regulatory frameworks need to be defined for the implementation of agreements as digital, smart contracts. Conforming to existing data standards in terms of both structure and transport for sharing of information needs to be harmonised.

Despite its apparent complexity and challenges , Blockchain usage in Telcos will increase dramatically in the next decade.The telco has a trusted position – even more trusted than government and banks — in most economies. There is an enormous opportunity to take that trusted position and make trust itself the heart of the telco value proposition in the coming decades.

” Becoming that digital quarterback for the local blockchain economy, facilitating settlements and transactions — it’s long been a dream. Remember — when the

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dollar was the currency in the twentieth century, banks made a fortune by selling trust ” TM Forum

Blockchain shares a key characteristic with 5G….its about the applications and use cases thereof…not the technology itself that will make it commercially successful……So the question for any self respecting Telcos exec with an eye on the future is ….What are you going to do about it ? Take the Bull by the horns or become an Ostrich and pray the storm passes by ?

2 : Robots and Telcos : 3CPO and R2D2 reporting for duty

Just as industrial robots are remaking the manufacturing industry by creating higher production rates and improved quality, Robotic Process Automation “bots” are revolutionizing the way we think about and administer business processes, IT support processes, workflow processes, remote infrastructure and back-office work. RPA provides dramatic improvements in accuracy and cycle time and increased productivity in transaction processing while it elevates the nature of work by removing people from dull, repetitive tasks. Although the term “Robotic Process Automation” connotes visions of physical robots wandering around offices performing human tasks, the term really means automation of service tasks that were previously performed by humans

RPA is actually a software development toolkit that allows non-engineers to quickly create software robots (known commonly as “bots”) to automate rules-driven business processes. In RPA parlance, a “robot” is equivalent to one software license At the core, an RPA system imitates human interventions that interact with internal IT systems. It is a non-invasive application that requires minimum integration with the existing IT setup; delivering productivity by replacing human effort to complete the task. Any company which has labor-intensive processes, where people are performing high-volume, highly transactional process functions, will boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation.

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Similarly, RPA offers enough advantage to companies which operate with very few people or shortage of labor. Both situations offer a welcome opportunity to save on cost as well as streamline the resource allocation by deploying automation . After processing the work using rules and adding data as necessary by accessing more systems, the human inputs the completed work to yet other systems like ERP and CRM.

Early adopters of RPA are finding that automation can radically transform back offices, delivering much lower costs while improving service quality, increasing compliance, and decreasing delivery time. But as with all innovations, organizations must learn to manage RPA adoption to achieve maximum results.In 2010, Telefónica O2 managed over 60 core processes (amounting to about 400 subprocesses). To reduce costs further, Telefónica O2 began eliminating non-value added processes and optimizing and simplifying the processes that remained.

As an example of an eliminated process, Telefónica O2 removed a legacy process that verified order shipments. The order process had become so mature that it was 99.99 percent accurate—the legacy verification process was no longer worthwhile. Besides process elimination, Telefónica O2 also sought to optimize processes by simplifying them, and by bringing the BPO provider onshore to gain a better understanding of Telefónica O2. The entire process rationalization initiative—which included process elimination, simplification, and optimization— reduced labor headcount by ten percent.

Telefónica O2 began its rollout with 20 robots. The next wave increased the number of robots to 75. Eventually, a third staff member was trained. With just a team of three RPA developers in-house, Telefónica O2 automated 15 core processes including SIM swaps, credit checks, order processing, customer reassignment, unlatching, porting, ID generation, customer dispute resolution and customer data updates, representing about 35 percent of all back office transactions by first quarter of 2015.

As of April 2015, Telefónica O2 deployed over 160 “robots” that process between 400,000 and 500,000 transactions each month, yielding a three-year return on investment of between 650 and 800 percent . In just three years, Telefónica O2 reported £950,000 in net benefits. For some processes, it reduced the turnaround time from days to just minutes. Subsequently, customer “chase up” calls have been reduced by over 80 percent per year because fewer customers needed to inquire about the status of service requests. Scalability was unbeatable—its robotic workforce could be doubled almost instantly when new products were about to be launched—and then scaled back down after the surge.

Some robots are designed to replace a human being, but they can usually work faster. This speeds up the process, perhaps causing a bottleneck elsewhere. Robots can also carry out tasks that are impossible for humans, or at least impossible for

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humans to complete within a reasonable amount of time. This might create opportunities to introduce greater complexity or more decision points into your processes than a human would be able to manage. But there are certain exceptions to this rule.

When humans execute processes, they make many little judgments based on common sense. So, for example, a human can gauge that “St. Louis” and “Saint Louis” are equivalents, but a robot will only recognize them as equivalents if instructed to do so. Robots will only execute exactly what they are configured to execute. In short, robots lack common sense. Thus, the explication of rules for robots must be much more detailed than for humans. Telefónica O2 provides an anecdote that illustrated this lesson well. When the Apple iPhone was announced, Telefónica O2’s customers could preorder the phone. In their exuberance, some customers preordered the iPhone multiple times. Whereas a human would likely recognize that a single customer is really requesting a single phone, the robot did not. The robot shipped customers multiple phones !!

Although Telefónica O2 is clearly an RPA proponent, it views RPA as a complementary tool along with process elimination, process improvement and even with other automation tools. It also stressed the importance of sequencing these tools so that process elimination and process improvement preceded RPA. Telefónica O2 has continued to use both BPMS and RPA solutions. Within the wider business, Telefonica still have ways and means of eliminating or automating processes using different technologies such as BPMS or removing a query type out of Back Office and adding it to their customer-facing online self-service capability. So RPA is not the only solution to everything, but it’s obviously a great tool to have in one’s repertoire.

The global market for RPA Software and Services reached $271 million in 2016 and is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 36%. The direct services market includes implementation and consulting services focused on building RPA capabilities within an organization. It does not include wider operational services like BPO, which may include RPA becoming increasingly embedded in its delivery . Digital effectiveness is all about organizations enjoying real-time process flows forged through the elimination of manual process break-points and intelligent linking of data patterns across the front and back offices. RPA is a critical building block in facilitating this journey.

You can’t create value – or transform a business operation – without converged, real-time data. Digitally-driven organizations must create a ” Digital spine ” to support the front office by automating manual processes, digitizing manual documents to create converged datasets, and embracing the cloud in a way that enables genuine scalability and security for a digital organization.Organizations simply cannot be effective with a digital strategy without automating processes intelligently – forget all the hype around robotics and jobs going away, this is about

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making processes run digitally so smart organizations can grow their digital businesses and create new work and opportunities.

This is where RPA adds most value today… however, as more processes become digitized, the more value we can glean from cognitive applications that feed off data patterns to help orchestrate more intelligent, broader process chains that link the front to the back office. In the pundits’s view, as these RPA solutions mature, we’ll see a real convergence of analytics, RPA and cognitive solutions as intelligent data orchestration becomes the true lifeblood – and currency – for organizations.

Maybe in the future an artificial smile may even appear on robotic faces from the pride of a job well done, a business outcome met – and maybe they will share their pride with one of you while sipping freshly brewed, fragrant and delicious coffee data from a fancy digital coffee mug. So bottom line : If you claim to be a DIGITAL TELCO then RPA will have to be part of your Digital DNA !!

3 : Industrie 4.0 and Telcos : Deutschland der Reisefuhrer

Industry 4.0 is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things and cloud computing. The 4.0 designation signifies that this is the world’s fourth industrial revolution, the successor to three earlier industrial revolutions that caused quantum leaps in productivity and changed the lives of people throughout the world.

Industry 4.0 is a project of the future of the German government’s high-tech strategy, which aims to advance the penetration of information technology in conventional industrial manufacturing .The strategic goal is to achieve the smart factory, which is characterized by its adaptability, resource efficiency and ergonomics, as well as the integration of customers, employees and business partners in business and value creation processes. The Internet of Things is one of the technological foundations for the smart factory.

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Within the modular structured smart factories, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions. Over the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in real time, and via the Internet of Services, both internal and cross-organizational services are offered and used by participants of the value chain. Smart Production, is a cornerstone of the Industry 4.0-Smart Factory concept, and includes the incorporation of advanced logistics management, man-machine interaction, and three-dimensional (3D) visualization technologies into production processes.

A harbinger of the next industrial revolution is already bubbling in the small Bavarian city of Amberg. The Siemens Electronics Plant manufactures simatic programmable logic controls (PLCs), used for automating equipment in a variety of industries from automobile manufacturers to food and beverage producers. Basic automation has been a part of the Amberg plant since it began in 1989, now machines and computers handle 75 percent of the production process from start to finish. In addition to PLCs, the plant also makes use of human machine interface (HMI) components such as heavy-duty touchscreens, and coordinates the process through WinCC software and the company’s engineering framework, known as TIA (totally integrated automation) Portal.

Given the variety of production environments and techniques, raw materials, and specialized equipment requirements for each industry, however, a one-size-fits-all solution will not be the answer. Consideration must also be given to the specific operating requirements of each production environment.

For example, in steel mills, temperature sensors must accurately measure the condition of steel plates and tooling in hot rolling processes in environment operating with temperatures reaching 2,100-degrees Fahrenheit. Wired communication systems do not work at such a high temperature, making wireless communication technology the only viable solution.

Oil refineries are an example where wireless signals are weakened because of the maze of metal pipes. In such environments, wireless technologies featuring strong diffraction and penetration capabilities, enterprise Long-Term Evolution (eLTE) technologies, fit the bill perfectly.

Schildknecht AG, a southern German specialist in industrial electronics, uses Twitter to let machines communicate with people, making both sides smarter. Whether single devices or complete production lines – the people responsible for operating the machines are active followers of a closed or open user group, which can follow and manage the tweets on a smartphone, tabs, or desktop computer. If a machine reports a product error or a malfunction warning, the communication can be bi-directional: The user can send a tweet back to the machine, for example, to reset

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the error. Implementing such solutions on a large scale requires reliable, secure networking from end to end.

However some observers feel that Industry 4.0 as a concept is poorly defined and suffers from exaggerated expectations; others believe that fully digitised products and value chains are still a ‘pipe dream’. The Gartner Group’s hype cycle for emerging technologies for 2014 places many of the technologies associated with Industry 4.0 (including machine-to-machine communications, big data, the Internet of Things and smart robots) near the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, still five to ten years from the point where the payoff for applying these in the broad market is evident. In a global 2013-14 survey, 88% of the respondents said they did not fully understand the underlying business models of the Industrial Internet of Things and its long-term implications for their industry. Even those convinced of the value of Industry 4.0 can foresee a series of barriers ahead.

Large investments are needed if enterprises are to make the move to Industry 4.0; these are projected to be €40 billion annually until 2020 for Germany alone (perhaps as much as €140 billion annually in Europe). These investments can be particularly daunting for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who fear the transition to digital because they cannot access how it will affect their value chains. So far take up has been cautious: even in Germany (a leader in manufacturing), only an estimated one in five companies uses interconnected IT systems to control its production processes, though almost half intend to do so.

Other critics say that systems are too expensive, too unreliable and oversized, and that the Industry 4.0 approach is being driven largely by equipment producers rather than customer demand. There is a strong divergence of views between those keen to promote the idea of a wireless (as opposed to simply “connected”), or even mobile (as opposed to nomadic wireless), factory future, and others who simply don’t see their customers ripping out and replacing their factory solutions.

With the large quantities of data being collected and shared with partners in the value network, businesses need to be clear about who owns what industrial data and to be confident that the data they produce will not be used by competitors or collaborators in ways that they do not approve. In particular, smart services will be based on the data generated by smart devices during their manufacture and use. For example, car-makers are reluctant to share data generated by their cars, for fear of finding their profits being squeezed by digital competitors.

The market is evolving fast, with a blurring of the boundaries between the domains of the manufacturing automation specialists, such as ABB, Bosch and Siemens, and of the IT providers offering applications and systems integration services. Where once there were separate ecosystems of hardware and software suppliers, the development of cloud and IoT solutions is bringing them together into the same competitive arena. At the same time, communications providers (hardware

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providers or service providers) are being sucked into the value chain to enable interconnection of devices and sensors so that data can be aggregated and analyzed.

There are several ways operators might attempt to break into this new market such as targeting new factory builds (where using mobile might reduce the upfront networking cost) and targeting factory refurbishments (where the cables need to ripped out anyway). They might also try a completely different approach. Spectrum sub-licensing (where national regulations allow) may make sense here, giving operator revenues (where otherwise they might have none), vendors the opportunity to sell their kit and factories the capability to use licensed spectrum within the geographical confines of their properties but retain control of their infrastructure and (assuming the licensing model makes sense) retain control over costs. 5 G “ slicing “ will allow Telcos to dedicate network resources to Industriel manufacturers. So there is a power play and any self respecting Tier 1 Telco must get ready for it.

According to Experton Analysyis , those who will become established players in the market are not necessarily the providers with the best IoT platform technology, but those who can establish a partner ecosystem around their own IoT platform. Major risks for industrial control systems are not related to information losses, but rather include system failures, communications losses and a loss of control. Often, such disruptive scenarios are a result of malware and DDoS attacks. Industrial security solutions shall help prevent such attacks. IoT logistics has a focus on product tracking and transport path optimization as well as fleet management for forwarding agents. Smart fleet management solutions must go beyond GPS tracking of vehicles and analyze consumption data, maintenance needs caused by wear and tear and fuel optimization.

For Telcos to really participate in this phenomenon of Industry 4.0 ( like Deustch Telekom in Germany ) they need to imbed and leverage the basic building blocks : Cloud Computing , Data Analytics and IoT. They need to develop and manage complex ecosystems through platform thinking. They must be prepared to orchestrate the 4.0 services delivery model in a manner that will benefit the whole ecosystem rather than trying to gobble up everything themselves. A real network effect can only be generated by ecosystems that combine a strong core solution (USP) with a strong business model (win-win) to attract more and more partners. Within the next few years, we will experience intense “coopetition” between competing IoT ecosystems.

Most of all one must remember that although technology — Big Data, cloud computing, and IoT — play an important role in Industry 4.0, the fundamental driver is a strategy for improving the efficiency and competitiveness of enterprises by resolving the fundamental challenges that plague multiple industries. In the words of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Industry 4.0 is ‘the comprehensive

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transformation of the whole sphere of industrial production through the merging of digital technology and the internet with conventional industry’.

According to Deutsche Telekom CEO ” Companies in the classic production industry are increasingly digitalizing and networking their business processes in real time so that they will be able to produce better, at less cost, and more flexibly in the future. The products and services from the corporation’s core business such as secure cloud computing, broadband and mobile networks, complex IT security solutions, and the ICT knowhow of all of the colleagues in Telekom Group are the foundation.”

4 : AI and Telcos : made for each other

Some of the main themes highlighted at the MWC were the essential enabling technologies that are going to determine the nature of the future digital world: artificial intelligence, robotics, SDN / NFV , security, privacy, identity etc. The most intriguing for most of us is… i daresay .. AI…Artificial Intelligence !!

In Wiki terms Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. For many, a useful definition of AI is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.

Developing machines capable of exhibiting human like intelligence has been in the research field from the mid-1950s. Underlying these machine capabilities is an ever-expanding set of technologies and software tools including neural networks, genetic algorithms, sensing devices and sensing interpretation algorithms.

Cognitive computing is a relatively new term, often used as a synonym for artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional computer systems, which are programmed by people to perform certain tasks, cognitive systems have the ability to learn through their

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interactions with both data and humans. They can even adapt and get smarter over time… matter is no longer science fiction.

Cognitive computing is a component of the broader trend around big data, but it is particularly important because cognitive computing focuses on the realm of unstructured data, which is clearly dominant in volume over that of structured data.You may want to read up on the IBM Watson Project here to get really want to dig deep into Industry initiative on AI / CC .

If you did not know but some of the basic AI technologies have already been incorporated by 3GPP into 4 G + network architecture .Self-organizing networks (SON) are the attempt to simplify and speed up the planning, configuration, management, optimization and healing of mobile communications networks.

One of the first standardized SON features, related to the “self-configuration” category, is automatic neighbor relation (ANR). ANR significantly reduces the time required to set up a base station by automatically managing neighbor cell relations, thus replacing time-consuming manual setup. ANR relies on the mobile terminal’s capability to report cells that it has detected but that are not part of the neighbor list broadcasted by the LTE network.

Furthermore, the anticipated massive deployment of small(er) cells, such as femtocells or picocells, as part of moving towards a heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployment strategy will push the ANR functionality, because the manual management of neighbor relations between cells will become even more challenging if not impossible.

According to pundits AI will have a profound impact on the Telco operators in various domains. For starters the mutually beneficial relationship between IoT and AI is manifesting itself in many successful integrations of the two technologies in the B2B and B2B2C space. The value propositions that underpin the fusion of IoT and AI include smart sensors (or intelligent sensors), which combine IoT and AI to provide realtime data and feedback.

AI will grab much of the attention in IoT-related projects because the IoT evolution requires a new and fundamentally different approach for locating devices / sensors and then beyond that, securing and sharing their location information. Without those, IoT won’t live up to its potential – and hype. AI impacts IoT solutions in two key dimensions—firstly in enabling real-time responses, for example via a remote video camera reading license plates or analysing faces; and secondly in post event processing, such as seeking out patterns in data over time and running predictive analytics.

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A handful of companies already have a very detailed picture of their markets thanks to far-sighted decisions to add connectivity to the products they sell. Komatsu, for example, uses its Komtrax system to track the activities of almost 430,000 bulldozers, dump-trucks and forklifts belonging to its customers. The Japan-based company has integrated monitoring technologies and connectivity into its construction and mining equipment since the late 1990s. Komatsu says the Komtrax system is standard equipment on “most Komatsu Tier-3 Construction machines” and on most small utility machines and backhoes.

Komatsu’s machines ship with GPS chips that can pinpoint their position, together with a unit that gathers engine data. They can then transmit the resulting data to a communication satellite, which relays that information to the Komtrax data centre.The data captured by Komtrax (and other Internet of Things solutions) delivers Market Intelligence , Offer VAS and Data to support AI. Komtrax provides valuable information about how its customers use its equipment, which can then be used to refine its R&D activities.

Furthermore, Komatsu is linking market information directly with its production plants through Komtrax . It says its factories “aggressively monitor and analyse the conditions of machine operation and abrasion of components” to enable Komatsu and its distributors to improve operations by better predicting the lifetime of parts and the best time for overhauls. The ongoing advances in computing science mean that knowledge (in the form of insights gleaned from large volumes of detailed data) can increasingly be used to perform predictive analytics, enabling new services and cutting costs

The full AI/telecom future may arrive more quickly than many people realize. SoftBank is a major player in telecommunications in Japan and the United States. Its founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son, is a believer in the key role that AI will play going forward. AT&T is settling on an AI platform that can be used for different things instead of developing “one-off” solutions every time a task requiring the predictive capabilities and massive number-crunching abilities of AI presents itself.

AI can be used to process the trillions of possibilities – really fast – it has been calculated that brute force computing power alone would take years. AI solution providers use Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, Bayesian and Neural Networks to do optimisation, prediction and modelling. Artificial Intelligence is used to determine the optimal solution (that is, the “best” configuration of network, taking all factors into consideration) for a given service request or traffic demand. AI is used to predict the need for network capacity upgrades, and to determine the optimum route design and configuration of networks. This means operators can optimize multi-million-dollar network investment and expansion plans against growing market demand, increasing agility and eliminating guesswork and the risk of overbuild.

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Unlike most sectors, Telcos purposefully and tightly connect their business lines with their IT functions. It is this integration that has enabled telcos to develop the services and products they offer consumers and customers.This dependence on IT will only grow as competition within the industry increases. Automating IT workflows using artificial intelligence can help telecom companies win customers by offering differentiated value propositions. Instead of dedicating the bulk of their time on completing rote, manually intensive processes, AI automation technology can liberate IT talent to focus on evolving and optimizing the company’s IT services to create an elevated customer experience.

AI is very much with us as a growing number of Telcos will likely find compelling uses for these technologies; leading organizations may find innovative applications that dramatically improve their performance or create new capabilities, enhancing their competitive position.Telcos must get deeper into AI …sooner rather than later….or the OTT players just might grab that piece of the action as well. Because the potential of AI has not gone unnoticed by OTT Giants. Google Deepmind is one such

initiative and maybe you need to get scared and do something

5 : Big Data : Corral Hadoop and Apache Shark

There is so much data out there today that no one can possibly process it all. For example, many companies have the data that can tell them how their customers actually feel, and when and why those customers might switch to a competitor. The problem is that most companies do not know what they don’t know. Data transfer is one of the most pressing problems for companies in the telecom industry today. As data requirements grow from month to month, cost for dealing the mass also goes extremely high.

Fortunately Apache Spark will save the day for those who are savvy enough to use it cleverly. Apache Spark is a powerful open source processing engine built around speed, ease of use, and sophisticated analytics. It was started at UC Berkeley in 2009

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and is now developed at the vendor-independent Apache Software Foundation. Since its release, Spark has seen rapid adoption by enterprises across a wide range of industries. Internet powerhouses such as Yahoo, eBay and Netflix have deployed Spark at massive scale, processing multiple petabytes of data on clusters of over 8,000 nodes. Apache Spark has also become the largest open source community in big data, with over 1000 contributors from 250+ organizations.

Data transfer is one of the most pressing problems for companies in the telecom industry today. As data requirements grow from month to month, cost for dealing the mass also goes extremely high.SK Telecom dealt with this data deluge problem as well as providing network a quality analytics platform for data scientists and network operators with Spark; how to process real-time network data more efficiently; and how Spark Streaming and Spark SQL, MLib are used for high-speed large enterprise data processing and analytics.

SK telecom network quality analysis has proceeded to provide reliable wireless network and network optimization. For network traffic suddenly increases rapidly and accurately various attempts to resolve the problem have been conducted. Using Spark Streaming, Mllib, Spark-SQL let move the real-time processing from base station quality data based on statistics and set active analysis basis up

Apache Spark in-memory infrastructure has the potential to provide 100 times better performance as compared to Hadoop’s disk-based MapReduce paradigm. The in-memory allows user programs to store data in the cluster’s memory and query it repeatedly. This is done using a Cluster Manager and a Distributed Storage System applications / algorithms (e.g., topic modelling, deep neural network, etc.), as well as massively scalable learning system/platform leveraging both application and infrastructure specific optimizations (exploring data sparsity, parameter server, etc). Spark brings the top-end data analytics, the same performance level and sophistication that you get with these expensive systems, to commodity Hadoop cluster. It runs in the same cluster to let you do more with your data.

If you think about Spark as merely a replacement for Hadoop, you are short-changing yourself. Instead of replacing Hadoop, consider Spark a complementary technology that should be used in partnership with Hadoop. Keep in mind that Spark can run separately from the Hadoop framework, where it can integrate with other storage platforms and cluster managers. It can also run directly on top of Hadoop, where it can easily leverage its storage and cluster manager. Simply put, Spark can run on Hadoop, Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud.

Some insight on Hadoop : https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/big-data-why-telcos-need-a-closer-look-at-hadoop/

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Yahoo has two Spark projects in the works, one for personalizing news pages for Web visitors and another for running analytics for advertising. For news personalization, the company uses ML algorithms running on Spark to figure out what individual users are interested in, and also to categorize news stories as they arise to figure out what types of users would be interested in reading them. Spark brings the top-end data analytics, the same performance level and sophistication that you get with these expensive systems, to commodity Hadoop cluster. It runs in the same cluster to let you do more with your data

Another early Spark adopter is Conviva, one of the largest streaming video companies on the Internet, with about 4 billion video feeds per month (second only to YouTube). As you can imagine, such an operation requires pretty sophisticated behind-the-scenes technology to ensure a high quality of service. As it turns out, it’s using Spark to help deliver that QoS by avoiding dreaded screen buffering. Conviva uses Spark Streaming to learn network conditions in real time.They feed [this information] directly into the video player, say the Flash player on your laptop, to optimize the speeds. This system has been running in production over six months to manage live video traffic.

Automating machine learning is an area where Apache Spark really shines. Spark is designed for data science and its abstraction makes data science easier. Data scientists commonly use machine learning – a set of techniques and algorithms that can learn from data. These algorithms are often iterative, and Spark’s ability to cache the dataset in memory greatly speeds up such iterative data processing, making Spark an ideal processing engine for implementing such algorithms.

For example, with Spark you can automatically determine the best way to train your learning algorithm, a technique commonly referred to as hyperparameter tuning. Machine learning is changing not only how we interact with machines, but how we relate to the world around us. During the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, speech recognition, effective web search and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome.

Expanded data analytics to enable better and faster decisions, is expected to accelerate process/product utilization, consumer/market understanding, and minimize risk in better time. New business requirements and usage models are emerging and driving the need for new big data analysis paradigms. In particular, there is increasing demand from organizations to discover and explore data using advanced analytics algorithms (e.g., large-scale machine learning, graph analysis, statistic modeling) for deep insights. For this and more we have Apache Spark !!

6 : Hot in 2016 and getting hotter in 2017

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This year was more about how we will leverage new technologies and reconfigure our business models : It was about stuff that will turn the Telco world upside down….5G , Digitization , Software Defined Networks , IoT , Smart Cars etc … not many Telco CEO’s moaned about OTT players eating their lunch…thank heavens …perhaps they have finally accepted the fact that you can still make money by leveraging new technologies and penetrating adjacent markets with some creative thinking. So lets summarise the hot trends in 2016 world that will drive the Telco business agendas going forward.

1 : 5G is hurtling at us like the Starship Enterprise at warp 7. Tier 1 Telcos such as Verizon , NTT DoCoMo, BT , Etisalat etc are busy trialling with the main vendors in Test Beds and research universities are achieving speeds of I Tbs. Thats your HD movie download in 4 seconds. Governments from EU,Korea , Japan are throwing millions into research even as respective Regulators get ready to dole out Spectrum to utilize higher frequency spectrums ranging from 6 to 66 gigahertz. This would take it into the millimeter-wave band, which will enable multi-beam multiplexing and massive multi-input-output (MIMO) technologies.In future, 5G will have a much wider influence in areas such as realtime monitoring of IoT sensors, due to its low latency attributes. with the arrival of the 5G era marked by Gbps-level speeds and ultra-low latency, we will witness a dramatic improvement in the content and service quality along with increased number of content and service channel….. If you are a Star Trek fan, then 5G-powered Internet of Things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) should fulfill some of your dreams..Beam me up Scotty !

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/5g-the-black-swan-has-landed/

2 : DIGITAL Telcos are the rage although the definitions vary but the desired end result is the same. The most successful CSPs are implementing customer centric systems that have the insight and visibility required to ensure every customer promise is fulfilled efficiently.The right blend of technologies will help the Telcos earn the Digital soubriquet. Think Analytics , flexible BSS/OSS , XaaS models and Virtualisation.

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Telecoms should learn from other industries, those that have undergone disruption and continue to innovate. For example, retailers centralize design, architecture, and operations so that local stores can benefit from the latest fashion items. They can plan and order with fast turnaround times. Engaging with customers in multiple digital dimensions opens a whole new world of contexts in which the service provider can interact with their subscribers, be it offering devices on Social Media or placing roaming package promotions on etickets.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/the-digital-telco-telefonica-is-the-mighty-sensei/

3 : IoT is about all about M2M chatter enabled by millions of radio chips embedded everywhere. In future Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning will grab much of the attention in IoT-related projects. The IoT evolution requires a new and fundamentally different approach for locating IoT devices and then beyond that, securing and sharing their location information. Without those, IoT won’t live up to its potential – and hype. With IoT, wearables and other connected devices, the industry is now moving in a new direction – from convergence bringing everything to smart phones, to divergence connecting everything to the Internet. With this market shift, the industry is screaming for a horizontal, next-generation operating systems that can meet the needs of innovators to deliver a cross-platform connected experience in the IoT-era.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/internet-of-things-iot-why-it-matters-to-telcos/

4 : SDN can reduce provisioning time from weeks to seconds, but internal IT and networking teams should not expect their deployments to go as quickly as that. Mobile operators that are serious about investing in restructuring their network infrastructure will need to plan carefully. The number of vendors in the SDN market continues to increase, and operators must take the time to choose those that best accommodate their needs. With the advent of SDN, the network can be dynamically programmed in a highly granular fashion, through the app itself. SDN/NFV technologies realize network services on shared standard hardware, allowing faster and easier modification of network configurations such as capacity and geographical location. By using SDN/NFV technologies, networks can be deployed for each individual service and optimized based on particular latency, bandwidth, safety and security needs.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/nfv-and-sdn-reloaded-get-started-telcos/

5 : SMARTPHONES accounted for 45% of global mobile connections Q4 2015 ( GSMA ), surpassing basic and feature phone connections for the first time. Affordability is a

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major factor influencing smartphone adoption, especially in the developing world. Smartphone prices are expected to decrease in future due to increasing competition, a drop in the cost of materials and improvements in software.Wearable devices featured heavily at MWC but also showed further signs of evolution. The first phase of enterprise mobility was about empowering users with mobile devices and email on the move and the second was about basic transactional apps, the third phase that we are entering now is about the transformation of business processes using mobile technologies, including wearables and other devices that have started to enter business thanks to the reduced cost of computing capability, familiarity by employees of wearable capabilities and increased acceptance by CIOs of BYOD.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/wearables-worthless-fad-or-game-changer/

6 : CONNECTED CARS are rolling with the arrival of LTE and the accelerator will hit the floor when 5G kicks in. Auto manufacturers are aggressively pursuing opportunities in the mobile space in their quest to fundamentally rethink transportation. These companies will triple engineering investment in driver assist technology, speeding the roll-out of semi automated systems that make it easier to park and drive in heavy traffic. An autonomous car will most likely become a third place where people will spend a good amount of time next to their living space and their office. Personal space and available time are scarce already and will become even more so. An autonomous car will use less fuel on a given route than a human driver on the same route, as it can allot just the right amount of energy that is needed. A live telemetry system that collects data from F1 sports car now works on a larger scale because of a Wi-Fi-based solution.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/mwc-barcelona-day-3-the-connected-car-is-getting-ready-to-roll/

7 : THE SEARCH for new revenue streams and business models is intensifying because many markets are now approaching saturation; most economically developed markets have already surpassed 90% unique subscriber penetration, meaning the vast majority of the addressable population in these market are already mobile subscribers. As smartphones approach an unprecedented level of ubiquity, the maturation of the mobile industry presents opportunities for operators, as well as undeniable challenges. The ecosystem enabled by almost universal mobile ownership is of huge value, but equally the traditional subscriber-acquisition model of operator growth must inevitably be re-evaluated. Collaboration and Co Opetition are in vogue since most players have realised they cannot own every facet of an ecosystem..its getting too big and complex.

https://maliksadiq13.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/telco-challenge-1-the-quest-for-new-business-models/

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2017 will be all about building , transforming , preparing for : the dawn of Cloud , IoT , Big Data , AI , VR Apps and services backboned on light speed fibre ultra dense radio and infrastructure that will enable consumers equipped with bendable screen smartphones enjoy a different kind of living on the move.

7 : Smart Cities : Strategic Insights

According to Wiki a SMART CITY is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets – the city’s assets include, but are not limited to, local departments’ information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, and other community services.

The goal of building a smart city is to improve quality of life by using urban informatics and technology to improve the efficiency of services and meet residents’ needs. ICT allows city officials to interact directly with the community and the city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city, how the city is evolving, and how to enable a better quality of life. Through the use of sensors integrated with real-time monitoring systems, data are collected from citizens and devices – then processed and analyzed. The information and knowledge gathered are keys to tackling inefficiency.

Turning a regular city into a smart city is not simple. There are a lot of challenges and issues to be tackled: Identifying the funding sources; defining the strategic plan; knowing the right benefits to the citizen and so on. But with well-defined standards and best practices, a complex path can be simplified into one that is easy to follow. Smart cities can be constructed over a set of digital services connected using smart solutions. But the common scenario in the public sector is that city planners know their problem but have no idea about how the smart solution could solve it.

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A smart city will never be delivered well by a single company…rather a strategic plan based on the ‘start small, think big’ philosophy that will guide the city along the transformation path . The establishment of a smart ecosystem is necessary to provide all the solutions needed and to deliver services to end customers. With this in mind, the roles of each company should be well defined, as well as the expected results. This will create the real value fabric needed for a win-win relationship and to ensure the quality of the service at the end.

Barcelona , the capital of Mobile World Congress , has established a number of projects that can be considered ‘smart city’ applications within its “CityOS” strategy.For example, sensor technology has been implemented in the irrigation system in Parc del Centre de Poblenou, where real time data is transmitted to gardening crews about the level of water required for the plants. Barcelona has also designed a new bus network based on data analysis of the most common traffic flows in Barcelona, utilising primarily vertical, horizontal and diagonal routes with a number of interchanges.

Integration of multiple smart city technologies can be seen through the implementation of smart traffic lights as buses run on routes designed to optimise the number of green lights. In addition, where an emergency is reported in Barcelona, the approximate route of the emergency vehicle is entered into the traffic light system, setting all the lights to green as the vehicle approaches through a mix of GPS and traffic management software, allowing emergency services to reach the incident without delay. Much of this data is being developed into practical solutions in the 22@Barcelona District, and has been enhanced by an opensource data pooling middleware.

The biggest challenge for most smart cities is the efficiency of managing and distributing resources to citizens and businesses. This has been attributed to the lack of a consolidated means of communication and data sharing – an issue that was acknowledged by Smart Dubai and pioneered its mandate for Open Communication among strategic partners from the private and public sector. Effective smart city leadership is not simply a matter of strong, top-down governance. It is much more about ensuring that the smart city is built around the citizen and their needs and aspirations. One of the core requirements of a smart city is the ability to engage citizens in tackling challenges – that includes residents, businesses and other community stakeholders. Achieving this can require cultural and organizational transformation, and there are technical challenges too.

Stockholm’s smart city technology is underpinned by the Stokab dark fibre system which was developed in 1994 to provide a universal fibre optic network across Stockholm Private companies are able to lease fibre as service providers on equal terms. The company is owned by the City of Stockholm itself.Within this framework, Stockholm has created a Green IT strategy.The Green IT program seeks to reduce the environmental impact of Stockholm through IT functions such as energy efficient

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buildings (minimising heating costs), traffic monitoring (minimising the time spent on the road) and development of e-services (minimising paper usage). The e-Stockholm platform is centred on the provision of e-services, including political announcements, parking space booking and snow clearance. This is further being developed through GPS analytics, allowing residents to plan their route through the city.

Many pundits believe that there is a very clear historical analogy between electrification and the technologies related to IoT/Smart Cities. They suspect that we are still in the early stages of the ‘Smart City/IoT’ and that it’s very hard to place winning bets on IoT technologies and applications at this time. However, we can foresee certain infrastructural solutions that will be needed in order for all of this to work, and whose shape and characteristics we can determine now. Like electrification there will be an entire secondary industry that will spring up to meet the infrastructure and logistical needs of the new technology. While we can’t predict the successful ‘Smart City’/IoT ideas in advance we can see a clear need to provide an entire suite of services to manage the very large amounts of time sensitive data that it will involve.

The infrastructure of the Smart City may not be standardized for at least 10 years. While cities and large corporations are starting to deploy networks with client download speeds of up to 1000mb/s, little thought has been given to how we give access within a smart city to the multitude of devices that will need to have reliable bi-directional connectivity in such an environment.Who will pay for bandwidth used by sensors that may perform important functions but aren’t owned by anyone in particular and don’t have user interfaces that lend themselves to configuration? How will the bandwidth be regulated, and by whom? While various cities have created their own individual public WAN, the lack of standardized mechanisms for access and usage management is clearly comparable to the disconnected and piecemeal spread of electric power generation.

As the devices get closer and closer to people the data will become inherently sensitive. A simple example: If you install a smart power meter or smart light bulbs, anyone with access to the data feed will know when you are not at home, even if it was never a design goal of the system. Vendors will need to store some level of personal data to build a subscription base, and a failure to secure this data can represent an existential threat to their business. Frost & Sullivan have predicted security to be the single biggest issue in the technology industry in 2016. A lot of data collected by IoT devices can be repurposed with evil intent, with one example being utility meter data, which can be used to determine when a building is unoccupied. Direct ownership and stewardship of data comes with costs which may challenge many start-ups

Telfonica provide digital solutions that enable a whole new generation of services and businesses all managed from an integrated and open FIWARE compliant

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platform. The FIWARE platform provides a rather simple yet powerful set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that ease the development of Smart Applications in multiple vertical sectors. The specifications of these APIs are public and royalty-free. Besides, an open source reference implementation of each of the FIWARE components is publicly available so that multiple FIWARE providers can emerge faster in the market with a low-cost proposition.

TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, recently announced a joint collaboration program (JCP) with the FIWARE Foundation to co-develop a Smart City API Reference Architecture enabling portability and interoperability of smart city solutions as well as a repeatable data economy model. This initiative presents significant opportunities for cities, communications service providers, technology suppliers and other parties to realize their part in the API economy, which according to IBM, will be a $2.2 Trillion market by 2018.

Recognizing its growing adoption by cities, TM Forum will incorporate the FIWARE NGSI API into its Smart City API Reference Architecture, thereby exposing FIWARE to TM Forum’s diverse global ecosystem of city governments, communications service providers, technology suppliers and global enterprises. The FIWARE NGSI API provides access to contextual information about what is going on in cities in near real-time, and can be adopted by cities, service providers and technology suppliers who wish to benefit from and monetize real-time open data.

There is no doubt that cities providing a digital platform business model will unlock innovation and economic growth for their whole population as well as the broader ecosystem of service providers and suppliers. Smart Cities will no longer be only about performing a more efficient management of municipal services but transforming cities into enablers of an Economy of Data !!

8 : Blockchain Phenomena : More disruptive than you think

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Every once in a while i get astonished by radical new technologies…for those of you read my blog or attend my Digital Telco training workshops know that 5G and Graphene are tops on my list. Now something else has taken hold of my fascination. And its here NOW not in 2020 !!

In the Telco industry we are so thrilled ( with good cause ) about the potential of LTE and 5G… AI , IoT , Big Data , Robots , Drones , Balloons or flying cars with on board Internet and IP TV..and yes we are so proud of Mobile Money…how the Telcos stole a lead from the Banks changed the lives of millions of unbanked in the developing countries….yawn !!

Yes…something else is lurking like a Shark ready to breach to tear apart and rearrange the fabric of the Digital economy….a technology that will change the world in ways you cannot imagine…AND all the incumbents in the Financial , Data , Telco , OTT players , Internet industries are in the firing line…noo its not BITCOIN…….its Blockchain !! The Blockchain technology is so simple that a dummy can understand

its implications …present company included

Over 30 years, no theorist of the digital age has better explained the next big thing than Don Tapscott. For example, in Wikinomics Tapscott was the first to show how the Internet provides the first global platform for mass collaboration. Now, he writes about a profound technological shift that will change how the world does business—and everything else—using blockchain technology, which powers the digital currency Bitcoin. Tapscott’s seminal book on Blockchain revolution is available on Amazon. Must read.

The Internet as we know it is great for collaboration and communication, but is deeply flawed when it comes to commerce and privacy. Blockchain, is the first native digital medium for peer-to-peer value exchange. Its protocol establishes the rules—in the form of globally distributed computations and heavy duty encryption—that ensure the integrity of the data traded among billions of devices without going through a trusted third party. Trust is hard-coded into the platform. That’s why we call it the Trust Protocol. It acts as a ledger of accounts, a database, a notary, a sentry and clearing house, all by consensus.

Although many opportunities for the blockchain require a digital currency, Bitcoin is only one application of this great innovation in computer science. The blockchain can hold any legal document, from deeds and marriage licenses to educational degrees and birth certificates. Call it the World Wide Ledger. It enables smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized government services, and transactions among things. A trusted decentralised Data storage in the Cloud ? hmmm …bye bye Amazon ?

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The Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything: the blockchain is a truly open, distributed, global platform that fundamentally changes what we can do online, how we do it, and who can participate. If we take the idea that through a huge shared network we can transfer and verify data, value, names, labels or documents, there is not an industry in existence that blockchain could not turn upside down.In the same way the Internet has always allowed near-zero marginal costs of distribution , Blockchain will allow near zero marginal cost in financial transactions and data storage.

Did you get it ? With Blockchain a migrant worker can send his hard earned cash back home without going through Western Union or his Mobile Operator…at a fraction of the cost. So sorry MPesa : The so-called Internet of Things will need blockchains to manage ultimately trillions of daily transactions. Traditional financial services companies cannot manage micropayments and settle payments, such as when a factory light purchases power from a public power auction.

Blockchain technology can provide the suppliers of these services a means to collaborate that delivers a greater share of the value to them. Just about everything Uber does could be done by smart agents on a blockchain. The blockchain’s trust protocol allows for cooperatives, or autonomous associations, to be formed and controlled by people who come together to meet common needs. All revenues for services, except for overhead, would go to members, who also control the platform and make decisions. Bye Bye Alibaba ?

If current development projects, being run out of MIT, are any evidence, blockchain social networks will have dramatically richer and more customizable functionality, where data is protected and consumers empowered, compared to incumbents. Existing vendors will either face disruption or embrace blockchain technologies to deliver much deeper capability to their customers. Bye Bye Facebook ?

Using emerging software and technologies, we can instill intelligence into existing infrastructure such as a power grid by adding smart devices that can communicate with one another, reconfigure themselves depending upon availability of bandwidth, storage, or other capacity and therefore resist interruption. This Internet of Things depends on a Ledger of Things to track everything, ensure its reliability, and pay for its contribution. There are potential applications across virtually every sector.

Transportation. Autonomous vehicles will get us safely wherever we need to go. They will intuitively take the fastest route, avoid construction, handle tolls, park all on its own, negotiate passing rates with other vehicles on the road, and communicate with traffic lights. Hello Connected Car ?

Infrastructure. We will use smart devices to monitor the integrity and other critical factors of road, rail lines, power and pipelines, bridges, runways, ports, and other

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public and private infrastructure to detect problems and initiate a response both rapidly and cost-effectively. Hello Smart City ?

Energy, waste, and water management. Traditional utilities can use blockchain-enabled things for tracking production, distribution, consumption, and collection. New entrants without infrastructure are planning to create new markets such as the neighborhood energy microgrid. Hello IoT ?

You remember Bitcoin was imagined by an anonymous computer programmer (or group of programmers—their identity is unknown) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in an attempt to break the tie between the state and money. It was intended to be the lingua franca of the internet—a currency born of, designed for and using the attributes of the World Wide Web.

Instead of just being a trading currency, blockchain promises to be a secure form of accounting for information more broadly. Put simply, before blockchain, if person A wanted to make a secure and verifiable exchange (of money, goods, services, title or information) with person B, they needed to go through a central trusted intermediary (a bank, exchange, regulatory agency, government). Trust was provided by these institutions, which in turn gained resources, control and power. The promise of blockchain is to cut out these intermediaries, and, in so doing, disrupt the world’s dominant power structures. Bye Bye Government ??

So what next ? Banks and Governments are getting into the Blockchain game. In the UK, the government is testing blockchain technology to store and transfer NHS records, and track public spending. The sprint to rebuild Wall Street with blockchain is on, with two giant and heavily funded companies squaring off to be the only game in town.R3CEV are technology innovators behind a consortium of 42 of the world’s largest banks (and counting), working together to create the fabric of blockchain for use in financial services.The question is can the likes of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, HSBC and BNP Paribas, all of whom are signed up, work together? You bet they will ..unless they want to be consigned to the rubbish bin of history.

And what about my BFF’s , the Telco Operators ? What are you going to do when your Mobile Money platforms become irrelevant ? Or someone else “ leverages “ a Blockchain platform to cash in on your IoT , Big Data , Digital Identity etc etc initiatives ….did you catch my drift amigos ?..so wake up….or you will be chained to a big block that will take you to the ocean bottom …ha ha

Contacts

email : sadiq.malik@broadbandgurus.net

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web : www.broadbandgurus.net

Twitter : @sjm786

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