Ever since the emergence of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the early 2000s, the world has looked towards Asia for leadership. To be perfectly fair, it hasn’t exactly found the encouragement it was looking for and ultimately the early Asian examples haven’t inspired copycat deployment elsewhere. But there is a new wave of Asian fibre deployments – both in developed and in emerging markets – that may well inspire other nations as we move forward.

Carriers are exploring a fundamental change to how they manage and operate their networks.

Distributed routing protocols that enable connectionless packet-based networking have long been the norm for carrier traffic. Now operators are exploring the idea of a central control instead of sprinkling intelligence across the equipment in their networks.

Thomas J. Watson, chairman and CEO of IBM, famously said: ‘There is a world market for about five computers’. While this statement would have been accurate at the time (1943), viewed through the lens of history it seems rather silly. In any case, the statement is probably apocryphal. There is no record that Watson ever said anything of the sort.