neXt Curve attended Huawei’s Analyst Day (HAS) 2021 which was hosted in-person and virtually from Shenzhen, China. This event shortly followed Huawei’s Annual Report which presented the state of their business during a difficult year for the company as it faced a wide range of sanctions by the US and the global Coronavirus pandemic. HAS 2021 gave us an holistic overview of the progress that Huawei has made in evolving and executing its “survival” strategy over the last two years since the company became the focus of deteriorating relations between the United States and China.
Continue readingTechnology Insight: NEOM
What if technology could not just make cities “smarter” but help us entirely reimagine the idea of a city of the future? NEOM is a visionary giga project that aspires to apply the most advanced in current and emerging technologies to realize a bold urban development concept called THE LINE, the revolutionary infrastructure concept that will bring about the world’s first “cognitive city”.
Continue readingInterdigital 6G Summit 2020: Key Takeaways
neXt Curve attended Interdigital’s first 6G Summit that was a two-day exploration of the technologies and the possibilities that will come after 5G. This event was a great opportunity to compare notes with some of the industry thought leaders and inventors who are ideating through the future of communications with the technology horizon research we did for Ofcom in 2019. Will 6G be a revolution on top of an expected revolution or just 5G cans kicked down the road?
Continue readingThe Future of Communications
In 2019, neXt Curve was selected among leading research and consulting firms from around the globe to provide research for Ofcom’s technology horizon study which is conducted every decade. Our report served as a key input into the Technology Futures report that was published in January 14, 2021. neXt Cure was tasked to articulate the key technology trends and dynamics that would shape the future of the communications industry which included the UK postal and broadcast services.
The outcome of our study was a technology horizon scan framework that was recommends to the Ofcom research team as a guide for the scoping and organization of their research program. The recommended framework identifies Four Knowns which are mega trends that are or continue to have an outweighed influence on the evolution of the communications industry.
- Cyberphysical Experiences – The transition from multimedia communications of today to the conveyance of cyber physical experiences. (Retrospective Update: Metaverse & Digital Twins)
- Everything will Communication – The realization of things, spaces, people, services, and content connected in accordance to the notion of the Internet of Everything.
- Industry Change from the Top and the Bottom – The trend of OTT players or non-traditional operators, systems integrators and technology firms disrupting the industry landscape by capturing share and influence in frontier markets as the nature of communications evolves over the decade challenging traditional operators and ICT vendors. We described this trend as Under the Bottom or UTB.
- Trust will be Challenged – Beyond security and privacy, the concept and foundations of trust will be challenged and compromised as social networking and communications technologies democratize media.

While we explored hundreds of specific technologies that could have transformative impact on the evolution of communications, we recommended six foundational technology domains and ten applied technology themes for further investigation which we detailed in the full report.
The executive summary of our study is provided below.
Crossing the 5G and IoT Connectivity Chasm with SDR and SDN
The 5G promise is broad and ambitious, but business leaders need to recognize that we are at the very beginning of this journey, and emerging technologies under the 5G umbrella are creating new opportunities for new entrants to fill the gaps as the world moves toward the promise of 5G such as 5G-enabled IoT, new shared spectrum resources, hybrid multi-cloud services brokering, network slicing on demand within mobile computing nano-data centers at the carrier edge.
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