Lays out 2030 Technology Roadmap for high capacity, ultra-low latency, and power efficient photonics-based technology that will revolutionize our lives, at work and in society

BARCELONA—February 12, 2024 – At MWC Barcelona this month, the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN Global Forum) will set out its technology roadmap for 2030, creating a more secure and sustainable world powered by light. Founded in 2020, the association is leading the development of pioneering technology that augments and replaces electronics with photonics to transfer and process vast quantities of data at speeds previously considered impossible. Senior executives and technical experts from Ericsson, Fujitsu, Intel, KDDI, Nokia, NTT, Red Hat and SKTelecom will discuss at a MWC panel session how collaboration is required across the entire technology ecosystem to realize this vision. They will share exciting use case examples, ranging from the way we spend money to the way we are entertained, and the technologies that will meet their requirements in practice.

IOWN Global Forum is building a community of best-in-class partners across diverse industries to revolutionize future communication infrastructure, based on leading-edge optical technology and information processing technologies. Its work is focused on multiple challenges facing society; from minimizing environmental footprint, to enabling the next generation of AI systems to handle unprecedented levels of distributed data in real time. According to the Worldwide IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2023–2027, 129 zettabytes of data were generated last year and will more than double in three years’ time.

To tackle key social issues and realize a smarter world by 2030, the member association sets out to lower power consumption by 100 times; deliver higher transmission capacity by 125 times; and lower end-to-end latency by 200 times.

IOWN Global Forum is now taking its vision to reality with use case level commercialization of its technologies. The association plans to focus on early adoption use cases that leverage the unique characteristics of IOWN APN, enabling ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low and deterministic latency network. Sectors include:

  • Finance – to help deliver zero-delay on financial exchange, zero-fraud financial transaction, and highly secure, automatic, resilient and easy-to-access financial services for greater consumer convenience and confidence.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) – to advance green computing with Remote GPU for Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). This will help mitigate the significant computing power and energy often required by emerging AI tools, while still enabling the power of AI.

IOWN Global Forum will continue to work on future-looking use cases, leveraging compute integrated network, in the following sectors:

  • Entertainment – to create ultra-immersive presence with 5 x senses plus, transforming the film industry and live events, for example, by displaying every conceivable background in three dimensions, and delivering frictionless interaction between the real and virtual world.

  • Energy – to deliver highly efficient energy management and low power consumption, improving the use of renewable sources by, for example, better exploiting solar energy and health monitoring of wind turbines, and creating an intelligent power grid.

Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe, President and Chairperson of IOWN Global Forum, commented: “IOWN Global Forum is bringing together like-minded companies to create a smarter world that billions of people can experience every day. Our technology roadmap sets out how we will create by 2030 an innate and pervasive next-generation communication infrastructure that addresses critical societal and environmental challenges and enriches consumer experiences. But this revolution won’t be simple and requires a truly global and open collaborative effort to make it happen.”

IOWN Global Forum Power90 Session at MWC – Thursday, February 29 2024

MWC delegates are invited to attend IOWN Global Forum’s Power90 Session on Thursday, February 29: “Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) for the Evolution of Mobile Networks”. They will get the chance to hear from executive spokespeople and a technical panel from Ericsson, Fujitsu, Intel, KDDI, Nokia, NTT, Red Hat, and SKTelecom about the future of IOWN technologies, the work of the Forum, and how these efforts will transform the telecom industry and many more.

Leaders from the IOWN Global Forum will present a business and technical overview of the Forum’s Open All Photonics Network (Open APN) and explain how this new network will contribute to the evolution of Radio Access Networks (RAN’s) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC).

Timing: Thursday, February 29, 10am-11:30am (doors open at 9:45am).

Location: Hall 8.0, Partner Theatre 6. Delegates should click here to register.

About IOWN Global Forum

IOWN Global Forum was established in 2020 as a private sector organization to develop IOWN technologies and use cases. As of the end of 2023, it is comprised of over 130 organizations. The objective of the IOWN Global Forum is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications, and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, use cases and best practices. For more information, visit iownglobalforum.org.

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Press Office 
IOWN Global Forum
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