The recent Global Information Technology Report (GITR) from the World Economic Forum highlights the role that ICT plays as an enabler of economic, environmental and social development today. The Networked Readiness Index in the report also showed that developing countries led by China and Brazil are catching up in terms of technology adoption.

There’s another aspect to the report that bears mentioning, and that is the rising importance and shifting composition of the Internet Economy, in chapter 1.2, and authored by Cisco’s Enrique Rueda-Sabater and John Garrity. Cisco has supported and made contributions to the GITR for most of its 10 years of existence and has used the Networked Readiness Index in many discussions around the world on the potential for networks to contribute to economic and social progress.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMm8ZmbZHYg

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Tags: Emerging Markets, GITR, internet, WEF

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

In my last post about exploring user adoption trends, I shared insights from the Cisco Connected Life User Experience (CLUE) — the unique Cisco tool that tracks worldwide service adoption trends in a weighted index. By comparing how the CLUE index has changed since 2008, we can see not just the rate at which a given service has been adopted, but how priorities have shifted over time.

Once again, Thomas Barnett of the Cisco Service Provider Marketing team:

“People often want to jump immediately to asking if this means that X percent of people in a region are using a particular service. We can get to that, but we’re trying to look at services more holistically. We want to be able to quickly grasp how people’s feelings about services are changing.”

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Tags: applications, CLUE, Connected Life User Experience, internet, Service Provider

Derided as an expensive box that would experience little demand when it was introduced in 2004, the Cisco CRS core routing platform has time and again proven those predictions wrong.  

At its inception, some thought Cisco would never sell more than 50 CRS units.  It has now sold the CRS to more than 450 service providers in 80+ countries . . . and counting.  

The CRS-3 has ramped even faster than the CRS-1, shipping to more than 80 operators – including nearly 20 Tier 1s – in more than 30 countries in just the first year since it was introduced.

And Cisco isn’t stopping there.  The company today announced major packet transport enhancements to the CRS-3, which was designed to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet and support the tremendous growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services.  

• Introducing Flexible Packet Transport for New Market Opportunities – The Cisco CRS-3 flexible packet-transport capability is a form of label switching enabled with the addition of a blade to the Cisco CRS. This scales the core network economically with fast switching, providing a high-speed, agile transport backbone.
• Significant Savings With a Single Cisco CRS-3 Platform – Because the flexible packet-transport capability does not require a new standalone product to be deployed in a network, operators can easily add it to existing CRS-3 networks without expensive, time-consuming qualification testing.  The CRS-3 delivers functionality that competitive solutions require three platforms to deliver.  Thus, the CRS-3 lowers total cost of ownership by as much as 40 percent. 

Tags: Cisco, core_routing, CRS, CRS-3, internet, traffic_growth, video

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

If your image of Eastern Europe leans toward Yugos and Soviet farm collectives, it’s sadly outdated. It’s entirely possible that, with new government programs stimulating Internet connectivity and new EU regulations benefiting less-developed members, Eastern Europe may be on the verge of its own broadband boom.

Eastern Europe already has a strong foundation from a broadband standpoint. When Jet-Stream, a Dutch content-delivery consulting firm, posted the results of Speedtest.net tests on broadband speeds last year, the results were more than a little surprising.

Download speeds in Latvia 18.86 Mbps, exceeded that of Japan, at 17.52 Mbps. Of the top 24 countries, half were in Eastern Europe (the other half was split among Scandinavia, Europe, and Asia). Of those 12, nine have joined the EU.

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Tags: broadband, economic development, EU, Europe, infrastructure, internet

If you haven’t looked at opportunities in Africa in the last couple of years, it’s time to take another look. A massive amount of new internet connectivity is creating new possibilities for the continent, changing the face of Africa forever.  The economic and social development opportunities created by high speed, stable and affordable internet access were something that the people of Africa could only dream of until relatively recently – now that dream is fast becoming a reality. Read More »

Tags: africa, bandwidth, business opportunities, cables, coc-collaboration, economic development, growth, internet, social development, submarine, TelePresence, video