The week before last, after the FTTH Council Conference in Stockholm, Stokab and Stocholm IT Region organized an event for their customers and stakeholders. They filmed the whole proceedings and have put it all up on a the Stockholm IT Region website. Since all of the speeches were of great interest, here are individual links to each one of them:
The morning started with an address by the Chairman of the Board of Stokab, followed by a fun presentation on the history of telecommunications in Stockholm by Anders Johansson.
This was followed by a very interesting presentation by Ericsson’s Head of Strategic Marketing on Smart Cities, presenting Ericsson’s Networked Society Index. You can find the Index itself here. What was interesting, beyond the ranking itself, was the trends emerging in terms of infrastructure, affordability of services and usage maturity.
Which led to Diffraction Analysis’ intervention, specifically on Smart Cities and the Infrastructure issues that are raised by connected community initiatives. It’s not the first time we deliver this speech, but I believe it was very appropriate to this audience and went down well. You be the judge.
Then followed an excellent speech by Christopher Mitchell on the US market and how some cities are taking broadband matters into their own hands (and others can’t). Christopher also talked about Google Fiber and the impact it’s having on the US market.
Henry Quek of Singapore’s regulator iDA then detailed how Singapore led the pack in terms of NGA and structural separation, and in particular showed how despite quasi-universal coverage the story is not over. Some fascinating things about enabling Smart City applications there, and a graph from Diffraction Analysis research quoted, always good for our ego.
The final speaker of the day was Chorus’ Martin Sharrock who explained very clearly how groundbreaking the New Zealand NGA model is, and the challenges that it faces from political turmoil.
There was finally a 45mn Q&A session with Ulla Hamilton (City of Stockholm), Crister Mattsson (Acreo) and Benoît Felten (Diffraction Analysis). The discussion was very complementary to some of the discussions had during the Investor’s Day earlier in the week: EU political process, structural separation, community involvement, etc.
Since Stokab then ran separate interviews of all the speakers, here’s Benoît Felten’s interview that summarizes some of the topics discussed during the presentations and panel discussions.
