The IOWN Global Forum was founded in 2020 to lead the development of high-capacity, ultra-low latency, and power-efficient photonics-driven technology, designed to provide new services, foster sustainability, and address societal needs worldwide. To celebrate this important milestone of five years of work, the Forum has released a snapshot update of its 2025 roadmap.
Member organizations of the Forum have been hard at work for the past five years, collaborating on groundbreaking technical papers, implementation models, proofs of concept, and use case reports. These efforts have worked towards identifying requirements of real-world applications of IOWN technologies. The Open All-Photonics Network (APN) technology was utilized in multiple exciting use cases such as mobile front-haul, remote direct memory access (RDMA) at the speed of light in cyber-physical systems (CPS), and advanced applications such as network digital twins.
Earlier this year during the IOWN Global Forum Midterm Member Meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, we spoke with Forum leaders on what the 5th anniversary means to them and where they see the Forum heading.
The future of the Forum will include focused efforts on Open APN and Photonics-Electric Convergence technologies, which will serve as the foundation for innovations in many applications, including fiber sensing, data spaces, digital twin frameworks, security, mobile networking, and data-centric compute and network service.