Future and recent events

In this mobility data forum, the final results of the project “data warehouse for Flanders” were presented, as well as some case examples of how companies and authorities deal with open data. The final project presentation can be downloaded here.

Data and Big Data are becoming more and more important in mobility. This workshop presents the first results on the project “data warehouse for Flanders” and provides answers to questions such as: What can these data mean to us? Who owns what data? Etc.

The Conference of Telecommunication, Media and Internet Techno-Economics (CTTE) is the major international event for the presentation of original and fundamental concepts and studies in the field of telecom, internet and media techno-economics. It also serves as a forum for communication among researchers and practitioners working in a wide variety of scientific areas with a common interest in improving techno-economics and advanced telecommunications internet and media services. The techno-economic team contributed two papers, one on the assessment of New Zealand’s FTTH deployment and one on tools for techno-economic evaluation for network scenarios via a modular network equipment database. We furthermore presented our [BEMES and business game tool] (http://www.technoeconomics.ugent.be/output/tools.html)!

Stimulating innovation through the introduction of novel IT solutions is by default a multidisciplinary field, certainly in pervasive healthcare. Few focus has been paid to the introduction of efficient and effective processes behind this innovation in order to integrate the solution in this complex care and cure ecosystem. Achieving a truly combined approach on research, product development, process design, management, improvement and optimisation, and measurement system through key performance indicators (KPIs) when introducing pervasive healthcare systems still proves to be challenging. The workshop was co-organised by our research group and the keynote was given by Jan Van Ooteghem (iMinds), presenting the goal and intermediate results of the HIPS project (http://www.iminds.be/hips).

Stimulating innovation through the introduction of novel IT solutions is by default a multidisciplinary field, certainly in pervasive healthcare. Supporting and solving healthcare problems need holistically combined methods and insights. Achieving a truly interdisciplinary approach on research and product development of pervasive healthcare systems, proves to be difficult. Aligning a complex ecosystem of stakeholders with different goals, backgrounds and perspectives, such as care delivery (medicine, home care), IT (communication, hardware, software, media), organisational, economic, legal and user perspectives, is one of the main hurdles to be tackled. This workshop aimed to bring together a diverse public on this topic to exchange knowledge and showcase the benefits of interdisciplinary healthcare systems design, to discuss case studies, and to develop guidelines on stimulating interdisciplinary cooperation and best practices how to avoid pitfalls.

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) represents a big step from current copper-based access technologies not only in terms of available bandwidth, but also because it will be accompanied by a paradigm shift (driven in great part by the need to share the conspicuous investment cost) from service-dedicated networks to open, multilayer networks where all services will be delivered over one access network. In the open network business model, competing service providers (SP) get end-user access through a single network, owned by a physical infrastructure provider (PIP) and operated by an independent network provider (NP). This leads to increased freedom of choice for the end users, service innovation, reduced environmental impact, as well as to an improved business case for deployment and operation. However, a number of challenges still remains to be met, like the lack of standardization of interfaces, lack of efficient network-virtualisation mechanisms, unclear service and network provider roles towards the end-user, proliferation of devices at the end user premises, and unclear regulation. This workshop, organized by the Open Network Forum, will focus on open networks as a driving force to reach the goals of the Digital Agenda. Possible answers to and solution proposals of the open network challenges will be collected by confronting the viewpoints of incumbent and alternative network operators, service and application providers, vendors, researchers, regulators and investors.

The main goal of this workshop is spreading knowledge from existing fiber network initiatives towards different players involved in potential future deployments. Expected revenues as well as indirect effects, potential synergies in deployment and operations, and suitable business models will be tackled. Discussion will be stimulated, both during the sessions, the final panel discussion, coffee and lunch breaks and networking reception. This event was co-hosted with the final public event of the iMinds TERRAIN project (Techno-Economic Research for futuRe Access Infrastructure Networks).

The goal of this workshop is discussing the why and how of a co-operatred rollout of FTTx networks and other utility networks as well as examining open access architectures in Sweden and exploring the business case for fibre and wireless convergence. Our research group contributed with two presentations on “The rollout and operational synergies between FTTH and other utility networks” (Jan Van Ooteghem) and “the Quantification of FTTH business cases” (Koen Casier)

Fiber to the Home (FTTH) represents a big step from current copper-based access technologies not only in terms of available bandwidth, but also because it will be accompanied by a paradigm shift (driven in great part by the need to share the conspicuous investment cost) from service-dedicated networks to open, multilayer networks where all services will be delivered over one access network. In the open access business model, competing service providers (SP) get end-user access through a single network, operated by an independent network provider (NP). This leads to increased freedom of choice for the end users, service innovation, reduced environmental impact, as well as to an improved business case for deployment and operation. However, a number of challenges still remains to be met, like the lack of standardization of interfaces, lack of efficient network-virtualisation mechanisms, unclear service and network provider roles towards the end-user, proliferation of devices at the end user premises, and unclear regulation. This workshop will bring up those challenges and will try to collect possible answers and solution proposals, by confronting the viewpoints of incumbent and alternative network operators, service and application providers, vendors, researchers and investors.

The main goal of our workshop on municipal fiber networks is spreading knowledge from existing fiber network initiatives towards different players involved in potential future deployments. We will tackle expected revenues as well as indirect effects, potential synergies in deployment and operations and suitable business models. Discussion will be stimulated, both during the sessions, the final panel session and coffee and lunch breaks.

CTTE is the major international event for the presentation of original fundamental techno-economic concepts and applications in the field of telecom, Internet and media. It also serves as a forum for communication among researchers and practitioners working in a wide variety of scientific areas within this domain. The CTTE2010 conference has finished. A high quality level of techno-economic papers, keynote presentations and workshops was obtained. This edition was organised by our techno-economic research group and hosted by our University.

As network Operational Expenditures (OpEx) have been identified as major factor of the Total Cost of the network Ownership (TCO), network operation cost modeling has increasingly attracted attention in recent years. This workshop aims at gathering models of network processes and case studies in different states of the network life-cycle. Reducing OpEx involves a good knowledge of the processes to operate the network as well as the services. The study of OpEx has turned to be very challenging due to several reasons such as the lack of models, confidentiality of most of the data, time variance of the parameters, human factors, etc. This workshop aims at gathering detailed models and data for the different network processes. This includes template or best-practice process descriptions and the associated input data, case study descriptions and results, discussion on methods and tools and the broader context in which this problem resides including the regulatory aspects. The workshop brings together various actors in the world of Network Operational Cost Modeling. Based on discussions we want to point out useful directions for future research in this field.

This workshop brings together researchers in the area of OpEx modeling and evaluation. Network operators have realised the high impact that OpEx has on the overall cost of their networks. To date, most of the existing studies have been focused on the Capital Expenditures (CapEx) of a certain technology, which are related to the network dimensioning and design. But nowadays, the interest is focused on OpEx and different challenges have been encountered such as for example how to model the OpEx factors, which are the most relevant factors, which is the impact that new control and management capabilities have on OpEx.

Over 90% of the FTTH subscribers in Europe are concentrated in the Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands and Italy. In the other countries FTTH deployment is experiencing an extremely slow start, mostly due to the exploitation of the current copper and coax access networks. Community initiatives could form an alternative to telecom operators who are postponing new investments in future fixed (FTTx) or wireless (WiFi/WiMAX) networks. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experiences and views on community networks from different European countries, approaches on this topic from different perspectives: possible technologies (FTTH versus wireless), cost aspects, regulatory aspects, economic aspects including potential business cases, real-life deployments, etc.