A couple interesting articles are worth highlighting:
- In the Edmonton Sun, Graham Hicks wrote a piece that quoted me: “TELUS fibre-optic Internet in Edmonton really is the second coming“
- Cisco issued a press release about its new Internet of Things System
The TELUS fibre to the home story is a follow-up on the company’s announcement a week ago about a $1B investment to rewire the city of Edmonton. A few days later, Bell announced plans to bring FTTH to Toronto and there was a follow-up story about potential plans for TELUS to expand its program to Calgary.
Cisco’s press release talks about a six-pillar approach for its IoT System:
- Network Connectivity
- Fog Computing
- Security
- Data Analytics
- Management and Automation
- Application Enablement Platform
Many of these areas were part of the panel and keynote discussions at The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit by various companies. But Fog Computing is an area that hasn’t had as much coverage. Cisco describes it as:
‘Fog’ is a distributed computing infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT) which extends computing capability – and thereby data analytics applications – to the ‘edge’ of networks. It enables customers to analyze and manage data locally, and thereby to derive immediate insights from connections. Cisco predicts that 40% of IoT-created data will be processed in the fog by 2018.
The evolution of the network, including orders of magnitude shifts in the number of things being connected, will impact so many aspects of our businesses and our communities.
The Cisco press release resonated with me as I thought more about the telephone companies’ fibre expansion plans.
Which communities and which industries will adapt first to take advantage of the array of platforms that enable a digital economy?
Be sure to listen to talks by some of the industry leaders who spoke at The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit. What themes provided an inspiration for you?