“Anything which would benefit from being connected will be connected in the future,” he said. That means 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
Bhikshesvaran believes that Ericsson is the leader in making the Networked Society a reality. Forty percent of all the mobile infrastructure in the world is Ericsson infrastructure and about 50 percent of all smartphone traffic in the world is handled through Ericsson equipment. How is the world progressing in terms of mobile connectivity? At end of 2011 there were six billion mobile subscriptions in the world and 85 percent of the earth's population had mobile coverage. By 2015 Ericsson expects to go from one billion mobile broadband users today to five billion mobile broadband users globally. The majority of new subscribers coming on to the Internet will do so through mobile.
“The smartphone revolution as we see it is something that is really happening all over the world,” said Bhikshesvaran. “It's not isolated in just a few nations.”
The Ericsson CMO noted that the massive smartphone adoption rates that took hold in South Korea, Japan and the US are now spreading to China, India and the Middle East. Fourth generation LTE networks are launching in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia has benefited from one of the earliest LTE expansions. LTE enables the fast transfer of huge amounts of data in an efficient and cost-effective way allowing consumers to enjoy applications such as real-time Web, online gaming, social media collaboration and video conferencing effortlessly and while on the move.
Ericsson's innovations go beyond high-speed connectivity. Learning will come into the mobile age through a cloud service that is based on IMS architecture: IP Multimedia Subsystem, an industry standard for multimedia communication, and the service In-Game communication from Ericsson. The possibilities of this technology are being demonstrated by a collaboration between Coventry University and Ericsson where it will be possible for teachers to give live lessons to up to a half-million students online. From their smartphones, students will be able to listen and interact with the lecturer and tutors who are also online.
“Beyond connecting people, we are also moving to connect machines. That is the intention of our partnership with global shipping line Maersk,” explained Bhikshesvaran. “Over the next two years Ericsson will connect the equipment and systems in 400 Maersk container ships to Maersk's back office systems. Independent of where the ship is, it will always be connected to Maersk's central control center. If it's close to shore it will use a land-based mobile communications network. If it's out on the high seas it will use a satellite based network. It doesn't really matter. The central control center will be able to monitor a variety of parameters related to the ship such as speed, equipment performance, vessel orientation, etc. Once you get connected you can start to monitor so many things.”
In addition to introducing new efficiencies and expertise into ship operations, safety would be enhanced as well. Bhikshesvaran pointed out that in the recent Costa Concordia shipwreck, if the ship had been fitted with machine to machine communication ability, the ship's owners would have been alerted the moment the vessel deviated from the plotted course. An inquiry could have been made to the captain about the reason for the course change, potentially saving lives.
One of the most amusing new technologies Ericsson showcased at CES was connectivity through people.
“With capacitive coupling we are using the human body to transmit signals,” said Bhikshesvaran. “By transmitting these very low energy pulses, what we have enabled is the power of touch.”
Ericsson's capacitive coupling uses water in the body to transmit data. Very weak signals pass through the body from a smartphone for example, to external devices such as electronic locks, printers, speakers or screens.
“Through capacitive coupling, if I met a business colleague and shook hands with that person, just by shaking hands, the business card that I have saved in digital format in my pocket in my smartphone could be transferred to the other person's mobile phone or tablet,” said Bhikshesvaran. “Within a two month period we were able to take this technology from what was a rudimentary implementation to something that could be packaged and put inside a mobile phone. Of course there's a lot more testing that needs to be done and it needs to go through different kinds of approvals, but I can foresee that given the right use cases, in 2013 our capacitive coupling technology could become commercially available.”
If that happens, just a touch would integrate anyone into Ericsson's Networked Society. (MYBI)
