LIVE FROM BROADBAND WORLD FORUM 2014: Executives from Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei this morning raised the challenges faced by broadband network deployment, which impact fixed and mobile players alike. Topics including WiFi, NFV and LTE were top of the agenda.

Federico Guillen (pictured), president of fixed networks for the France-based player, kicked-off proceedings by noting: “The key is the business case. That’s the problem, that’s the challenge, that’s what everybody faces.”

“You have to invest, invest a lot of money up-front, and you are not sure what is going to happen with the technologies you are deploying, you are not sure about what is going to happen with regulation, you are not sure if competition is going to move faster or slower,” he observed.

“On top of that, there are other things. What happens with legacy services – legacy services that are normally quite profitable? Is the new network going to be capable of sustaining those types of services? Those are the types of question that can generate a lot of doubt in the mind,” Guillen continued.

But the need for rapid return on investment means that the pattern of network rollouts are generally very similar – even if that is not in the best interests either of the operators or the population as a whole.

“What you see is big deployments going into the cities, what you see is many operators in the same place. It is a waste for the industry. That’s something for politicians to think about,” he noted.

Jeffrey Gao, chief marketing officer for Huawei in Western Europe, highlighted the importance of how developments in the IT sector are impacting telecoms networks.

“Today there is a lot of talk about software defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV). That kind of thing is not from the telecoms industry, it’s from the IT industry,” he said.

“We cannot ignore it, because we cannot ignore some of the core technologies in the IT area – things like cloud computing, things like the performance of CPUs, things like the cost of storage. We must leverage these kinds of technologies in the telecoms area, because we are entering a new age where IT will reset the network,” Gao continued.

One area where there was agreement is that broadband no longer refers purely to fixed network development – it also encompasses mobile networks through the growing reach of LTE.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Guillen said: “Convergence is the key. The mobile, fixed offering is something that is now used by everybody. All of you use your smartphone more in a fixed network than in a mobile network – 90 per cent of the broadband traffic from a smartphone is over WiFi, which is a fixed network.”

And Huawei’s Gao said that “consistency of experience is extremely important once you go from the fixed network to the mobile network”.

To this end, he cited work with operators to look at the handover of voice-over-WiFi and voice-over-LTE, to enable users to seamlessly access services when at home, in the office, or on the move.

Noting the widespread use of WiFi to offload smartphone traffic, he noted: “Maybe the only thing you are using the mobile network in the home is for voice.”