As President of Fiber to the Home Council Asia-Pacific, I am really excited about the forthcoming annual conference to be held in May 19-21, 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand.

Let's look at some of the compelling facts for the region:

By year-end 2016, nine economies are forecasted to reach FTTx household penetration rates of 20% or higher:

1. Hong Kong
2. South Korea
3. Singapore
4. Japan
5. Taiwan
6. New Zealand
7. China
8. Malaysia
9. Australia

It is no surprise that the Council approved a new Committee that focuses on the development of Gigabit Fiber access in Asia as a necessary infrastructure for Cloud Computing, and next generation applications, for example, e-Health, e-education and Smart Municipalities.

We could imagine a fundamental architecture as per below that is infrastructure centric and programmable. With a real-time, programmable platform for
placing traffic demands across Next Generation Wide Area Network one can support customer applications and services with APIs that are driven by the Service Provider and /or end customers; and, additionally leverages existing IP/MPLS control and data plane functions.

Cisco plans to be active at the forthcoming conference in Auckland, and, I personally look forward in welcoming you at this venue!