Global technology trends

By Erik Ekudden, Group CTO, Ericsson

All around the world, the unprecedented events of 2020 have brought into focus the critical role that digital infrastructure plays in the functioning of virtually every aspect of contemporary society. More than ever before, communication technologies are providing innovative solutions to help address social, environmental and economic challenges by enhancing efficiency and enabling both intensified network usage and more well-informed decisions. The communications industry supports other industries by enabling them to deliver services such as health care, education, finance, commerce, governance and agriculture. Mobile networks globally and in India are proving yet again that they can deliver the performance and reliability to support society in this hour of need.

In this article, I will capture some of the key emerging trends that I see shaping the communications industry .The trends capture the ongoing evolution of the network platform in terms of the key needs that are driving its evolution and the emerging capabilities that will meet both those and other needs.

The network platform is the spinal cord of intelligent digital infrastructure

The digital infrastructure offers endless possibilities to individuals, enterprises and governments across the globe, with its unique ability to bridge vast distances and enable powerful new solutions to a wide range of social, environmental and economic challenges. Health care, education, finance, commerce, governance and agriculture are just a few of the sectors that stand to benefit from the massive efficiency gains that digital infrastructure can provide.

Designed to carry vital messages, commands, reasoning, insights, intelligence and all the sensory information needed to support the continuous evolution of industry and society, the network platform is designed to be the spinal cord of digital infrastructure. The major advantage of the network platform is that it will be accessible anywhere, always-on and with guaranteed performance. It will be inherently reliable and resilient, fulfilling all the requirements for secure communication.

With this in mind, it is clear that the most important future network trends to watch in 2020 are those that relate most closely to the growth and expansion of intelligent digital infrastructure on the network platform. The first three of the seven trends this year are the key drivers of network platform evolution – the creation of a collaborative automated physical world; connected, intelligent machines and the internet of senses. All three highlight the growing need to bridge the gap between physical and digital realities. Most notably, this involves delivering sensory experiences over networks and utilizing digital representations to make the physical world fully programmable.

#1: A collaborative, automated physical world

As physical and digital realities become increasingly interconnected, advanced cyber-physical systems have begun to emerge. These systems consist of humans, physical objects (machines and other things), processes, networking and computation, and the interactions between them all. Their primary purpose is to provide individuals, organizations and enterprises with full transparency to monitor and control assets and places, thereby generating massive benefits in terms of efficiency. One early example of this is the way that cyber-physical systems can help planners optimize energy and materials usage.

#2: Connected, intelligent machines

Machines will become increasingly intelligent and autonomous as their cognitive abilities continue to expand. Their understanding of the world around them will continue to grow in tandem with their ability to interact with other machines as part of a cognitive system of systems.
The network platform will provide an automated environment in which interconnected, intelligent machines can communicate, including support for AI-to-AI communication and autonomous systems such as communication among self-driving vehicles and intelligent machines in factories.

The future network will empower cognitive machines by providing them with new network features and services such as sensing, high-precision positioning and distributed computing capabilities.

#3: The internet of senses

The ability to deliver multisensory experiences over future networks will make it easier than ever before to transfer skills over the internet. It will ultimately lead to the emergence of the internet of senses, which combines visual, audio, haptic and other technologies to allow human beings to have remote sensory experiences.

The internet of senses will enable seamless interaction with remote things and machines, making it possible to fully realize use cases such as remote health checks, remote operation of machinery, holographic communication and virtual reality (VR) vacations

In the years ahead, major leap forward is expected in sensor and actuator technologies, such as the actuation of smell and high-quality touch sensation. During remote operations, the advances in haptic devices will allow virtual objects to be perceived just as the real objects themselves. Holographic communication will be possible without wearing extended reality glasses, due to 3D light field display technologies.

Eventually, brain-computer interfaces will enable communication at the speed of thought where, instead of speaking to machines, humans will merely think in order to direct them.

Trends 4-7 are increasingly advanced technologies in four areas – non-limiting connectivity, pervasive network compute fabric, trustworthy infrastructure and cognitive networks. Breakthroughs in these four areas will be essential to fully enable trends 1-3 and continuously expand the capabilities of the digital infrastructure through the network platform in the years and decades ahead.

Future technologies will enable a fully digitalized, automated and programmable world of connected humans, machines, things and places. All experiences and sensations will be transparent across the boundaries of physical and virtual realities. Traffic in future networks will be generated not only by human communication but also by connected, intelligent machines and bots that are embedded with artificial intelligence (AI). As time goes on, the percentage of traffic generated by humans will drop as that of traffic generated by machines and computer vision systems – including autonomous vehicles, drones and surveillance systems – rises. Thus, it is clear that the most important future network trends to watch in 2020 are those that relate most closely to the growth and expansion of intelligent digital infrastructure on the network platform.