Reading Record -6: The True Nature of IOWN

Sometime ago, I had the opportunity to learn about a communication technology called "IOWN."

At the time, I only heard about it briefly, but I really wanted to verify the part about "power consumption becoming 1/100th?!," so I immediately purchased it on Kindle.

Akira Shimada is a person who has been involved in research, development, and management at NTT for many years, and is currently the President and CEO of NTT Corporation. This book, "The True Nature of IOWN," was written from his perspective, as someone who understands both the technology on the ground and its implementation in society.

IOWN is a next-generation communication infrastructure centered on optical technology, and it is a concept that attempts to fundamentally rebuild the current network, which is based on electrical signals. In this book, he discusses the reality that the current internet is approaching its limits in terms of speed and power, and the necessity of a new mechanism to overcome this.

With IOWN technology, NTT aims for a future with 100 times the power efficiency (1/100th the power consumption), 125 times the transmission capacity, and 1/200th the latency, and the roadmap for this is presented in the book. If that is realized, a society where doctors can support surgeries from far away or autonomous vehicles can drive safely will become a reality. And AI and virtual spaces will become more familiar parts of our lives. That will likely change the shape of our lives significantly.

Reading this book, one can have the expectation that technology originating from Japan will have a major impact on the world. At the same time, it makes me think that we, too, must not leave the future solely to corporations, but must explore what we can do ourselves.