The ICT KTN and Mobile VCE are jointly hosting a workshop to investigate the key trends shaping future applications, services and infrastructure, focusing on a vision for the year 2020 and what innovation will be required to achieve this vision.
Mobile and broadband traffic continue to grow at an exponential rate resulting in further capacity investment and the requirement for new spectrum and advanced infrastructure development and deployment.

The current ICT market is seeing an unprecedented rate of change, driven by the convergence of new digital services, mobile Internet, cloud computing, broadcast, IPTV for linear and non-linear TV, and social networks. Mobile phones, smart-phones and tablets are becoming an integral part of daily life, always on wherever we go, providing our own personal cloud of services, and are likely to become companion devices to connected TV and radio content.

It has also been predicted that by 2020 there will be a rise from 6 billion (present day) to 50 billion digitally identifiable, potentially linked, electronic devices on this planet. This proliferation of digitally identifiable devices and the concurrent dramatic increase in pervasive data is creating disruptive opportunities and possibilities.

Given the unlimited potential for this globally-integrated market, some major challenges need to be addressed to ensure sustainable value chains to finance the future investment to realise the maximum potential from this opportunity.

Traditionally, services and the underlying supporting technology and infrastructure have been developed and deployed at a similar rate. However, a significant gap now exists. Digital service innovation cycles and rate of adoption are much faster than technology & infrastructure. The business model for development of services does not require a high CAPEX investment but leverages the ubiquitous infrastructure to connect these applications. In contrast, the underlying infrastructure is a very CAPEX intensive business model with long innovation cycles.

This workshop will explore the 2020 vision and identify the key challenges to address the innovation required to bridge the business models and identify the underpinning innovation challenges to maximise the benefit for all of the ICT value chain.