| Broadband Innovation of the Year: ZTE |
ZTE VP Xu Ming talks about the main trends impacting the industry's growth.
The telecom industry escaped the worst effects of the global financial crisis and is now experiencing robust growth. Telecom investment in Asia Pacific has generally become more diversified, but broadband networks are still the central focus for investment in network construction.
Telecom operation models have undergone a major transformation worldwide, and this has been brought about by the development of broadband services. Asia-Pacific operators have chosen two paths for network development. One is network transformation - building a manageable, controllable transmission pipe so that transmission is capability adaptable rather than traffic transparent. The second is value extension: leveraging advantages in capital, technology and management to extend value to both the cloud (service) and terminal (home network) sides.
What do you see as your biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge is to understand the future business model of broadband network development. Broadband consumption is fragmenting, and demand for video, social networking and location services are growing rapidly. Because users require high-bandwidth access anytime and anywhere, a broadband long-tail effect is taking shape. Changes in telecom consumption are accelerating the transformation of traditional ICT services into a complex ecological system of services.
What are operators' main pain points?
Sustained profitability is the operators' biggest challenge. The introduction and development of over-the-top (OTT) services put traditional fixed-line operators at the risk of being marginalized by the whole value chain of video services and thus becoming pure providers of access pipes.