Potential Impact

The Ambient Networks project has the potential for a fundamental and sustainable impact on the development of future mobile networks. The project will shape the future telecommunications arena and extend it into other areas like IT services and content delivery. It will thereby contribute to the realization of the vision of ambient intelligence. The different aspects of this impact are considered in the following sections.

Ambient Networks will impact the mobile communications market as well as other markets in several different areas and by complementary mechanisms as follows:

Stimulate sustainable growth and maintaining the competitiveness in the European communications sector by creating new business opportunities for wireless access and network service provisioning. The Ambient Networks concept of “composable” networks will enhance the unbundling of the telecom business value chain, and will lead to new revenue opportunities and increased competition to the benefit of the consumer. The consortium behind the project has both the determination and the critical mass to create industry and market consensus to make a decisive impact on standards. It is a cooperation of the majority of world-leading operators, suppliers, research organizations, and other industries with the aim to develop an integrated approach and to reach global consensus on a new, robust, and technology independent mobile network architecture beyond 3G.

Enable the emergence of new businesses growing from the user community. Advanced auto-configuration, security and self-management technologies will allow users and small enterprises to interact with the communications world as business partners, connecting their own networks and introducing their own new services.
Strengthening social cohesion by providing efficient, intelligent and secure mobile network access that is easy to use and affordable for everyone according to his or her individual needs and within their financial constraints.

Support the smooth transition to new technologies and services by enabling incremental and stepwise market introduction of network technologies.
As an Integrated Project within the Wireless World Initiative of the 6th Framework Program, Ambient Networks mobilizes the resources necessary to research and deploy such new approaches.

It will integrate results from the previous 5th Framework Program and other projects, but not suffer from the patchwork approach imposed by the limited scope of such smaller projects. The impact will be realized by joint approach of public dissemination of project results, prototypes and trials, and contribution to all relevant established standards bodies as detailed later in this section.

Technical Objectives