A subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom is building a datacentre the size of 30 football fields in order to help satisfy Germany’s high demand for cloud services.

T-Systems, the IT and telecommunication services arm of the operator group, will begin operations from the 150,000m2 datacentre, which will be Germany’s largest, in 2014.

There is a clear need for standardisation of network virtualisation and cloud services – that was the verdict of Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, chief technology officer at Deutsche Telekom, who delivered a keynote presentation at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam this morning.

Marxist theory made an appearance at the beginning of his presentation – Jacobfeuerborn averred that it is now easier to start up an enterprise as capital is more widely distributed than at the time of Marx in 19th century Germany.

In parallel with the adoption of LTE in the wireless space, the fixed line community is undergoing its own long term evolution. Speaking to a small group of journalists and analysts outside the RAI yesterday morning, Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO of equipment vendor Ericsson, said the explosive growth in cloud technology was spurring the requirement for Software Defined Network (SDN) specifications for service providers and telcos.

“The architecture of the network must evolve to cater to growth,” Uwaldsson said, referring to forecasts that data traffic will increase 15 fold over the next five years, having already grown 104 per cent year on year between 2011 and 2012.

Mobile banking will be an increasingly important channel for UK banks and financial institutions over the next three years and will be a key factor in retaining customers and increasing loyalty.

In a survey of 50 CIOs from across the UK wholesale, investment and retail banking sector, 49 per cent of organisations said that mobile banking is important to customers today, while 71 per cent predict it will be by 2015.

In 1919 Irish poet WB Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’, a work that conjured the image of a “spiritus mudi”—a vast warehouse that contained all the archetypes of human concepts. This enormous storage facility was located somewhere out in the inhospitable desert, yet magically accessible to every person walking the earth. Almost a century later, in the age of high speed data transport, intelligent networks and virtualisation, it’s easy to forget that behind the almost magical connection delivering information to the screen in front of the end user’s eyes, there is a solid, squat building full of humming electrical equipment. The datacentre is almost an abstract concept in itself. It sits at the heart of the network and carries out many of the critical tasks that keep the services fl owing; rarely, if ever, occupying the attention of the millions of customers it serves.

The vision of a datacentre as a hulking steel warehouse packed with racks and racks of servers studded with flashing lights isn’t far wrong. But what actually goes on behind the glowing LEDs? A telecom operator’s datacentre houses critical applications such as OSS and BSS and everything essential for running the Master Control Centre. As a result, a datacentre requires 24/7 uninterrupted availability, high security, high speed connectivity and lots and lots of power. That power is by far the biggest factor in running a datacentre, so if a carrier can reduce the electricity bill by 30 per cent, they can dramatically reduce cost. This consideration has influenced a number of approaches to datacentre building. Scale—a common concern in the telecoms industry—is another important dynamic affecting which approach an operator takes.

The advantages of faster connectivity are rarely questioned these days, with consumers told it will improve their access to lifestyle and content services and enterprise users focused on improved productivity. Often the touted benefits are, to a degree, abstract. But in the world of high-frequency financial trading (HFT), the benefits are very measurable and very significant.

High-frequency traders use super-fast computers to trade automatically hundreds of times a second, often arbitraging tiny price differences between stocks listed on different venues. Added up over the course of time, the combined value of all those tiny profitable trades quickly builds into vast mountains of cash.

The advantages of faster connectivity are rarely questioned these days, with consumers told it will improve their access to lifestyle and content services and enterprise users focused on improved productivity. Often the touted benefits are, to a degree, abstract. But in the world of high-frequency financial trading (HFT), the benefits are very measurable and very significant.

Revenue generated from the sale of content delivery network (CDN) services will grow threefold in the five years to 2017 to reach $4.63bn, on the back of a fivefold rise in global CDN traffic, according to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media.

Commercial CDN services are provided by a variety of companies, including “pure play” CDNs (of which Akamai remains the largest), telecoms network operators such as BT, AT&T and Telefonica, and relative newcomers to the CDN market such as Amazon and Google. Google already uses its own international CDN to distribute its YouTube video service. In addition, Google recently ventured into the market for commercial CDN services, in providing support for NBC’s online coverage of the London 2012 Olympics.

The days of the old-style triple or quad-play bundles are numbered. Going forward, operators will have to offer a whole range of new content and applications within their bundled products – including OTT content from companies like Netflix and Spotify and even VoIP from providers like Skype – to keep their subscribers happy.

A report from Informa T&M, Beyond Quad-Play: How Multi-Screen, OTT and the Cloud Are Transforming Next-Generation Bundling, takes a global snapshot of the fast-changing bundling market and shows how operators across the global market are offering new services and applications to bring more value to their bundled products.

The European Commission has released details of a cloud computing strategy that it claims will create 2.5 million jobs and boost EU GDP to the tune of €160bn annually by 2020. The Commission’s plan for “Unleashing the potential for cloud computing in Europe” is intended to speed the uptake of cloud services in the region, according to Neelie Kroes, EU vice president for the digital agenda.

“Cloud computing is a game-changer for our economy,” said Kroes in a statement. “Without EU action, we will stay stuck in national fortresses and miss out on billions in economic gains. We must achieve critical mass and a single set of rules across Europe. We must tackle the perceived risks of cloud computing head-on.”

The Commission believes that the absence of common standards and contracts is dissuading enterprises from embracing cloud services, with fears around the safety of internal and customer data paramount. A proposed European Strategy for Cyber Security is to be put forward “in the coming months”, the Commission said.

The Commission said that key actions of the cloud strategy include:

“Cutting through the jungle of technical standards so that cloud users get interoperability, data portability and reversibility; necessary standards should be identified by 2013;

Support for EU-wide certification schemes for trustworthy cloud providers;

Development of model ‘safe and fair’ contract terms for cloud computing contracts including Service Level Agreements;

A European Cloud Partnership with Member States and industry to harness the public sector’s buying power (20 per cent of all IT spending) to shape the European cloud market, boost the chances for European cloud providers to grow to achieve a competitive scale, and deliver cheaper and better eGovernment.”