"But it always requires you to take fibre closer to the user ...There's a few truths, and one is that you always have to go closer with fibre to make it work, because the signal attenuates dramatically when you go to high distances and that's just the physics of propagation."

The comments from Mr Weldon come after NBN announced on Tuesday that 300,000 premises slated for fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) would be getting FTTC instead, lifting the total FTTC premises to 1 million, compared to the 700,000 flagged in its recently upgraded rollout plan.

Future needs

Mr Weldon is also president of Nokia Bell Labs, the company's research institution, and he said the upcoming "5G era" would be defined by 10 Gbps speeds, currently possible over copper. However he predicted that this would increase to 40Gbps within the next five years, and then to 100 Gbps.

However the point of such speeds remains grounded in theory as he said current electronic devices would be ill-equipped to take advantage of the lightning speeds.

"There's a reason why an Intel processor runs at a few gigahertz and they have had to go to multi-core as a way to solve the problem, because the electronics couldn't go any faster," he said.

"But now we have to start moving to new materials ... we're reaching the limits of what normal silicon can do."

Mr Weldon joined Nokia in early 2016 after it completed the acquisition of smaller French rival Alcatel-Lucent for €15.6 billion ($22.08 billion).


The acquisition was the final step in Nokia Corporation's transition to a network equipment and wireless technology business, after it had integrated with the former Nokia Siemens Networks, divested its devices and services division and sold its mapping service HERE to a consortium of Audi, BMW and Daimler.

Alcatel-Lucent won a major contract for the regional backbone of the NBN in 2010.

Last week NBN announced a trial with Nokia of its new fibre technology NG-PON2, which provides speeds of up to 10 Gbps for its fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) end users.

Mr Weldon said Nokia was helping NBN to ensure nothing it was deploying would be wasted, even if it chose to rollout more fibre in the future.

Nokia has suggested repurposing the nodes, which are effectively airconditioned boxes, and turning them into hosts for cloud services, which would make a transition away from FTTN less of a financial kick in the teeth.

"If you're clever in your architecture, you can always repurpose it when the next evolution comes," Mr Weldon said.

"There's an idea in our industry called mobile edge computing wherein you bring cloud servers very close to the edge so you get high performance services with low latency and high bandwidth. The cabinets can be used to host cloud services."

The idea of bringing cloud servers closer to the end users is all part of Mr Weldon's vision for the connected future.


Global-local paradox

To enable innovations such as autonomous vehicles to be taken up widely Mr Weldon believes cloud services will need to become more localised to deliver the necessary download and upload speeds and minimise latency.

Currently it takes about 100 milliseconds for a computer to ping the web host, but Mr Weldon said for self-driving cars to deliver the envisaged safety advances, this time will need to be reduced to 1 millisecond, meaning the host will have to be within 100 kilometres.

"[At the moment] autonomous vehicles just send their position data, but car manufacturers would like to send everything. Generally when an autonomous vehicle crashes into something, it's because they didn't recognise what was ahead of them ... So the thinking is that it will need the cloud to assist the decision making," he said.

"The data will be analysed in the cloud and then have the action sent back, but that requires tonnes of upload and download bandwidth."

Bell Labs

Consultants from Nokia's research institution Bell Labs have predicted that by 2025 people will consume 60 times as much bandwidth as they do today, driven in a large way by the future usage of virtual reality technologies.

Already in the three months to December 31, Australians downloaded 2.6 million terabytes of data.


Bell Labs is charged with envisaging and creating the technologies for the future and to date has won eight Nobel Prizes (seven in physics and one in chemistry) in its 92-year history, the most recent of which came in 2014.

The research institute was originally owned by AT & T and the Western Electric Company.

Mr Weldon said Bell Labs was focusing its research on a few key areas: quantum computing, sensors that can be embedded in the human body to monitor more health statistics and virtual teleportation.

"We're thinking about how to teleport, but in a new way – if you could send a complete sensory map of one person from one local to another and you could feel what it's like to be in another location and you have VR and you have haptics and there's even smells you can recreate and tastes," he said.

"By sending that from one place to another you are virtually teleporting, sending a complete representation of what it's like to be over there, here. It seems crazy, but that's just communication and thinking about what we do is we build ways for people to communicate."