It’s “silly and dangerous” to claim that New Zealand won’t need ultra fast broadband access, says Cisco country manager Geoff Lawrie.
At a presentation to mark a decade of IP telephony, Lawrie pushed the case for better connectivity, rejecting recent reports (2025 Taskforce and Motu Report) which questioned the business case for fibre broadband.
He says Cisco has 650 telepresence suites worldwide, making up 15% of the company's IP traffic, with video making up 55%. Lawrie predicts most businesses have the same traffic profile in the next two years.
His predictions were backed up by Guido Jouret, Cisco vice president and CTO of emerging technologies, who was located in San Jose but was presenting to a group of media via the telepresence suite at Cisco’s Auckland office. It was a point-to-point connection, over three screens, with each screen requiring 3-5Mbps. The presentation went for an hour and Jouret told us the session would consume more bandwidth than an entire years worth of email. “You can’t suck a golf ball through a straw,” he says.
Jouret heads the division in Cisco responsible for new business. He’s in charge of areas of innovation, which are referred to – and treated like – start-up companies. Each start-up is expected to make a $1 billion turnover in five years.
Jouret says there are four areas of acquisition – collaboration, energy/sustainability, virtualisation and video – but that he personally spends 50% of his time on energy. That’s because Cisco see the future demand for its core product – routers and switches – being driven by the creation of smart grids. Intelligent electricity networks that are able to turn power generation on and off as required, and in so doing create dramatic energy savings. In one slide it was suggested that “the idle capacity of today’s electric power grid could supply 70% of the energy needs of today’s cars and light trucks without adding to generation or transmission capacity.”
It’s also a huge, untapped market for Cisco – while 30%-40% of the western world’s homes might have broadband, over 90% of the world has access to electricity.
A long way perhaps from those pioneering days of IP telephony, when the Department of Social Welfare (as it was then called) deployed VoIP to 8000 phones and as Lawrie says, ten years on, there is “still the healing of scars around that process”. VoIP is now common place in large organisations because it has simplified voice delivery, for example the ASB went from 140 different PBXs to a single telephony platform when it switched to VoIP.
IP telephony has also enabled innovation such as smart applications and presence. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” says Lawrie.
PHOTO – 1972 PABX, now on display at MOTAT.