The establishment of the World Broadband Association (WBBA) in 2022 answered an overwhelming need from the fixed broadband industry to have an association that represented them, said Martin Creaner, Director General. Creaner spoke to IoT Insider following the recent publication of their whitepaper investigating the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in broadband infrastructure.
Where the WBBA started with 12 members, it now registers 160+ across 50+ countries today. “It’s an itch that had to be scratched by the industry,” said Creaner, in reference to the continued growth of fixed broadband across the world.
In addition to the whitepaper, the WBBA regularly keeps tabs on broadband adoption worldwide, including ‘The Fibre Deployment Index’ which looks at the quality of fibre deployment and has been running for five years, and ‘The Broadband and Cloud Development Index’, which measures the quality of broadband and Cloud given that fixed broadband is “relatively useless without good access to Cloud”. One key finding – that the US has poor fibre deployment but is high-ranking in broadband and Cloud development – goes to show that metrics vary widely.
As of this year, it now publishes ‘The Gigacities Index’, launched at MWC, where 30 cities from 30 countries have been picked and are ranked based on how sophisticated they are. This is because businesses make their investment decisions using that precise criteria: “If Casablanca in Morocco happens to have excellent broadband and Cloud deployment, then that’s maybe where your business is going to base itself, even if the rest of Morocco isn’t great,” explained Creaner.
Because of this, Creaner said he saw cities driving broadband operators to improve the quality of their connectivity, because they believe it will attract inward investment.
Catching up with AI
The rapid progress of AI has presented a challenge for enterprises to try and catch up, particularly for network operators who may want to understand how AI benefits their business and how they can deploy it. This is precisely the kind of insight that WBBA offers in their latest whitepaper.
The whitepaper came to the conclusion that AI makes the best impact when used in the pre-deployment phases of networks, where it can make suggestions for network planning and expansion decisions, for instance.
Beyond the technology, the culture and mindset of a company is equally important – something Creaner knows too well having written and published a book, ‘Transforming the telco’, which centered on the digital transformation journey telecommunications companies were on. Now writing an updated version, it acknowledges that the journey has shifted from digital transformation, to what Creaner termed ‘intelligent transformation’.
“The point at which you entered this at [AI taking off] is really important, because AI is of limited use unless you are an AI-native organisation,” noted Creaner. “Many operators are 100 years old, 120 years old. They’ve grown up sometime before that, [and] there’s a whole lot of overhangs in terms of culture and [their] business model and ways of working.
“When we talk about where you enter the AI discussion, it’s initially [about] looking at your internal processes and seeing how you can change your organisation to be more AI native, rather than just trying to implement a single point AI solution.”
One example of where AI can be useful is understanding where to deploy fibre networks, by exploring population densities, population uptakes, service takes, and other parameters that are important, and basing this decision on the information provided.
Sharing one scenario, Creaner said: “How can you use AI to optimise where you deploy fibre networks? At the simplest level, there are multiple ways of giving broadband to people, ranging from fibre to fixed wireless access, 5G, to using satellite …. At the moment that decision tends to be based at a very high level, and AI can be used for this.
“Decide, first of all, [that] these few streets should be focused on first because that’s where you’re going to get the best return on investment for fibre deployment … and this particular area over here, we should focus on fixed wireless access because we know the fibre runs are going to be quite long, and we don’t have existing infrastructure in the ground to support that type of deployment.”
The key takeaway here is to use it or lose it. “Telco is struggling at the moment, and has been for a number of years. AI is potentially an injection of adrenaline into the business if they take advantage of it,” said Creaner. “If they don’t take advantage of it and view it as another incidental technology, then I think the operator is going to find it difficult to use, difficult to monetise, and [it will] become another cost on the organisation.”
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