Marking its fifth birthday, the IOWN Global Forum, the trade association associated with the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) project – has released details of its activities for 2025, placing an emphasis on updating reference architectures and technologies to drive optical comms technological developments while developing early adoption use cases to demonstrate the value and feasibility of IOWN technologies across key industries.
Led by NTT, the IOWN project was created to meet the growing needs of the hyper-connected business world of the future, offering a future global communications infrastructure capable of enabling ultra-high-speed, high-capacity internet services utilising photonics-based technologies. In its mission, NTT is being supported by the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Sony, Ciena, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Orange, Telefónica and Google.
It aims to address the almost exponentially rising demand for data and a commensurate rise in energy consumption due to the vast amounts of compute power required by future applications, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) use cases. This network and information processing infrastructure includes terminals that can provide high-speed, high-capacity communication using technology focused on optics, as well as large computational resources.
NTT’s IOWN all-photonic network (APN) infrastructure is being designed to enable high-capacity, low-latency and low-power consumption communications through end-to-end optical connections without converting optical signals into electrical signals.
Founded by NTT, Intel and Sony, the IOWN Global Forum was established as a private sector organisation 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.
It currently has more than 150 member organisations spanning geographies and industries, from construction and financial services to gaming and entertainment as well as webscalers and communication service providers. They include Accenture, Chunghwa Telecom, Ciena, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Google, KDDI, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange and Red Hat.
Emphasising energy efficiency, low latency, high throughput and determinism, the Global Forum added that its efforts would be centred on Open APN and photonics-electric convergence technologies. These technologies are designed to serve as the foundation for work fibre sensing, data spaces, digital twin frameworks, security, mobile networking, and data-centric compute and network services.
The Global Forum revealed that it would address existing markets such as financial services, media production, AI computing, construction and other CPS applications. In the latter use case, it will look at applying technology to scenarios including remote surgery, smart manufacturing, smart buildings, real-time disaster notifications, prediction and prevention of disease outbreak and event-driven security monitoring.
Katsuhiko Kawazoe, IOWN Global Forum president and chairperson, said: “On a worldwide scale, there is ever-increasing demand for power, data and speed across every aspect of our digital lives. But we are reaching the limits of this generation’s communications and infrastructure technology, and a paradigm shift is required.
“In 2025, the IOWN Global Forum will continue its ground-breaking work on network innovation that will lead to unprecedented advances in communications capacity and latency, computing scalability and power efficiency to create a smarter, safer and more sustainable world.”
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