Photo/Illutration Katsuhiko Kawazoe, a senior executive vice president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., announces the start of commercial IOWN services at the company’s head office in Tokyo’s Otemachi district on March 2. (Yasuro Suzuki)

Services of a next-generation communications platform called the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) were made commercially available for the first time by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) on March 16, the telecommunications giant announced. 

The new infrastructure system is characterized by “low latency,” or significantly reduced communication time lags, which could be only one-200th of the corresponding delays in existing optical communication systems.

There are hopes the IOWN services, which will be basically provided to corporate clients, will prove useful in a number of situations, including self-driving.

The concept of IOWN, proposed by NTT in 2019, is about using optical signals everywhere along the communication path in transmitting data from the sender to the recipient.

Existing forms of optical communications that are broadly used in general households rely on optical fibers to transmit data in optical signals. However, they still involve an obligatory process of converting optical signals to electric signals and vice versa along the communication path, which gives rise to latency, or time delays.

IOWN, which obviates the need for the signal conversion, can reduce the time lags considerably.

The low latency, which characterizes the IOWN services, could be useful in an array of cases, including self-driving vehicles, remotely controlled robots and e-sports played by individuals in far-flung locations.

One medical practitioner who used IOWN to remotely control a robotic surgical system during a demonstration test was quoted as saying the surgery involved no sense of discomfort.

Use of the IOWN services requires, among other things, purpose-made terminal devices, which are marketed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corp. (NTT East) and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corp. (NTT West).

NTT officials stopped short of giving details, such as concrete figures for the sales targets.

Apart from the low latency, the IOWN project has also set the goal of achieving low power consumption, with a 100-fold increase in electrical efficiency compared to the existing optical communication systems, and a large capacity, with a 125-fold increase in transmission capacity.

NTT will seek to develop specific terminal devices and communications equipment in the years to come to help realize those targets. The company is hoping to put to practical use the entire IOWN plan in 2030 or later.

Other leading companies, both in Japan and abroad, have also joined the IOWN project. A global forum has also been set up for discussing specifications and other details of IOWN.

Katsuhiko Kawazoe, a senior executive vice president of NTT, told a news conference on March 2 that KDDI Corp., another Japanese telecommunications giant, has become a fresh member of the global forum.

“We have yet to talk with KDDI on joint work projects, such as one for making specific devices,” Kawazoe said, although he added that NTT is planning to work with the rival company to push the spread of the IOWN platform.

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