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Broadband as the ‘fourth utility’

ALPHEUS MANGALE By 2018, 60% of devices will be smart devices and 78% of data traffic will be video streams, enabling enhanced collaboration, education and access to information

ALPHEUS MANGALE By 2018, 60% of devices will be smart devices and 78% of data traffic will be video streams, enabling enhanced collaboration, education and access to information

28th March 2014

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Broadband communications, and the services and information enabled by this, are becoming so entrenched in society that its use can increasingly be likened to other utility services, such as water and electricity, says networking giant Cisco South Africa MD Alpheus Mangale.

The first annual Cisco Technology Radar found that the main trends that would shape technology development in 2014 are those that are changing the way people learn, work and play.

The main trends identified include browser-based video and collaboration, context-aware computing, new Internet architectures and the Internet of Everything, which is a situation where every active and passive device is connected to the Internet.

“The link between all these trends is the data connections and networks needed to carry the mass of information. In this hyperconnected milieu, security is paramount and necessary to move towards the Internet of Everything,” he says.

Some of the examples given by Cisco of the capabilities that the Internet of Everything will enable is the diagnosis of a person while he or she is being transported in an ambulance heading to the hospital; the intelligent management of traffic, traffic lights and street lights; and the intelligent management of irrigation systems using data from weather services to determine when and how much to irrigate.

By 2020, an estimated 50-billion devices will be connected to the Internet, significantly more than the population on earth.

“The evolution of the Internet over the last 25 years has resulted in significant changes in people’s lives; from e-commerce to social networking and improved collaboration across a company’s footprint. We are moving into the era of social collaboration, as people will source information from experts in the company who are not involved in the project or the problem in question. This will enable companies to use their internal resources more effectively, as well as source information from outside the company,” says Mangale.

While South Africa requires better connectivity to facilitate the volumes of data that will have to be moved, the most immediate benefit that the Internet of Everything can provide is to reduce the impact of poor infrastructure on service delivery and to provide critical health services in remote regions and patient care services at homes.

Such a system of connected devices can also result in the more efficient use of resources. For example, energy-intensive industries can be warned when electricity supply approaches peak, enabling them to scale down use and potentially avoid a blackout, while utilities could remotely switch off power to geysers in houses during peak periods, he says.

However, while this trend will influence the direction of developments for the next year, South Africa requires investment in its communications networks and smart equipment to deploy these capabilities.

A more immediate step towards the Internet of Everything is machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. This type of communication requires significantly less data traffic and is providing significant value for many industries in the country, including agriculture, mining, insurance and asset tracking.

Meanwhile, the problems of education can also be addressed using video collaboration. For example, if a school does not have qualified mathematics or accounting teachers, a video feed of a lecture of a renowned teacher can be broadcast directly to the classroom, enabling children, even those in remote regions, to learn from the best educators in the country.

“By 2018, 60% of devices will be smart devices, up from 30% last year, and 78% of data traffic will carry video. This is significant and the driver of these changes is the citizen using his or her device to do business, access information or interact socially using real-time video calls,” concludes Mangale.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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