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IOWN 2.0 – the next applications for the next-gen network architecture | Computer Weekly
In the first part of our round-up of the Dallas meeting of the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) project’s Global Forum conference in October 2025, we looked at the technological development of the association’s all-photonics network (APN) – and the continued work in essentially “moving from electronics to photons”, as a representative of one of its key member companies insisted its mission boils down to.
One of the most important developments over the past year was using the APN to support a theatre performance that synchronised live and virtual performers in Japan and Taiwan, running over a network that was over 3,000km long.
In addition to validating a very important use case, the Cho Kabuki project also saw the APN being at the heart of a digital twin, whereby the producers could digitise the performance character and manipulate it in the computing space while being certain that latency would not adversely affect synchronisation. The lessons from this area are likely to be applied to digital twins in the industrial space. Smart warehouses are one key example cited.
NTT’s Masahisa Kawashima, IOWN technology director and head of the technology working group at the IOWN Global Forum, says plans also include demonstrating commercial operability of the APN and defining a new functional architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) computing platforms using co-packaged optics and optical circuit switches.
The agile deployment of optical fibres is seen as essential for forthcoming 6G networks. IOWN APN provides a virtualisation layer on top of physical fibre infrastructure. This allows multiple mobile operators to share fibre infrastructure, mitigating availability issues and costs.
It is worth noting that soon after the Dallas conference, IOWN forum member Nokia announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia to add the latter’s AI-powered radio access network (RAN) products to Nokia’s RAN portfolio, enabling communications service providers to launch AI-native 5G Advanced and 6G networks on Nvidia platforms.
Modes of modernisation
Looking at a broader perspective on what enterprises will likely need to do to tap into this revolution, Jefferson Wang, chief strategy officer for cloud first at Accenture, noted in Dallas that having made a significant $3bn investment in AI, including classical AI, generative AI and physical AI, his company was aiming to solve the big problems faced by industries, governments and societies alike, and assist them in their transformation. In short, exactly what IOWN sets out to do.
Accenture has identified five key areas for modernisation: new architecture; application refactoring; data and AI flow; infrastructure changes; and operational model changes. Wang acknowledges that to address these enterprise and societal challenges, Accenture’s cloud modernisation practice is focusing on infrastructure, network security and operational changes – and these plans will only be realised with modernised networks and compute solutions.
“If we’re helping industries, governments and societies change, there could be a challenge with where is the modernised network, where is the actual compute and how do you think about the storage? So, in our cloud practice, one of the things we identified is that modernisation is not just a lift and shift story to transform these companies,” says Wang.
“The first [challenge] is to figure out this new architecture. The second is how to think through the actual applications. Do you refactor them? Do you just lift and shift them? What do you do with the applications? The third is your data and AI. How do you do your data flow? How do you think through these different forms of AI? The fourth is what infrastructure changes, network modernisation, and security [measures] you have to put in place. And the last one is how to think about your ways of working that have to change.”
As a result, change is an imperative. It could be a change in a business’s operational models. It could be that a full stack of financial operations is needed for a company to make sure the transformation economically still makes sense.
A question of compute
When Accenture looked at all of these things, and looked at the permutations and big macro trends, Wang recalls it mostly came down to a need for more compute, and more compute close enough to where data is created or used. And that means population centres. Wang notes that firms were having a hard time finding affordable real estate and power for datacentres near population centres, and that at the time, there wasn’t a good answer for that issue.
However, what is a good answer for the Accenture cloud modernisation practice is optical networks. That is replacing the expensive and energy-hungry electronics, solving the problem at the optical layer of networks, and innovating on the transponder. Wang references Cho Kabuki as a great example of what is currently possible and where the use of an APN could lead, such as, again, digital twins in manufacturing.
“Proving 3,000km between Taiwan and Japan with 17 milliseconds [latency] and no jitter [is] a big deal. It changes the actual economics of what we’re trying to do. That’s game-changing. I can do ‘what if’ scenarios on the digital twin. A manufacturing industry cares about the number of shifts you run, the flexibility of your line and, ultimately, worker safety. If you can’t do ‘what if’ scenario planning, it becomes very hard to be flexible. A digital twin is generally a big, heavy compute [operation], so if I can’t move it back and forth quickly, it becomes static, and it doesn’t help with the ‘what if’ scenario planning,” says Wang.
“So, knowing the value drivers of an industry is incredibly important for us, and then figuring out how we’re going to transform it. We orchestrate the ecosystem, and we’ll find an operator with the right spectrum holdings for factories, and then we’ll orchestrate the solution to figure out the architecture. That is a private network, millimetre-wave for this piece of video analytics, sub-6G comms for that piece, the communication trunk. And then we might want to be able to say, here’s the right edge solution [and] build a computer vision solution on top of it, and then we wrap the solution together. But that also requires [thinking about] what you are doing with the trunk, the optical layer of the network.”
Accenture’s commitment to IOWN spans around four years, and before this time, a number of the company’s clients were members of the association. Wang observes that when Accenture looked at the macros and big trends, such as what AI was going to do in all its forms, the result was that firms needed to think about cloud posture and compute.
Accenture then began to identify some of the potential choke points to infrastructures, some of which could also be control points given the right technological basis. How to unlock those was really the impetus to diving deeper into IOWN, which has the mission to address the three pillars of capacity, latency and energy consumption. Wang stresses what these should mean as regards a true business solution.
“Conditioning the enterprises to understand the value of each [pillar] is as hard as pulling the solution together. You say the word ‘latency’, and if you go to a CEO and you say, ‘I can reduce your latency down to one or two milliseconds,’ they might say, ‘Okay, great. What does that mean?’ And then you have to say, ‘In a fast-moving production line, here’s your error, and then, to create an automated solution, you need your latency or jitter to be at this threshold, and currently your baseline is three seconds.’ So conditioning, the value of that is actually quite hard. So those three pillars, to me as an engineer, are exciting, and the innovation that’s happening at IOWN is really exciting and fast paced, but actually the value chain of what you’re putting it into takes awareness and education, it takes a business case, and it takes conditioning to value it.
“Because one of the things that really fascinates me about IOWN [version] 2.0 is looking at the deterministic part of the [technology]. You can now have that conversation. It’s deterministic quality service, deterministic latency. [In] finance, if the regulator says [minimum network latency level] is ‘that’, then you work around that. That’s a different combination than [saying] it’s just a bit faster network. This is completely different. We have found that that level of understanding is clearer [to CEOs], it’s more quantitative. When you get deterministic, that’s where it gets very exciting.”
Moving to real-world applications
This is also where it gets more practical, as far as the association is concerned. Kawashima says that for the next 12 months, the emphasis for IOWN will be on one thing: commercialisation. The plan is simply to pass from showing a robust and well-thought-out proof of concept to accelerate into real-world applications.
He says: “To me, proof of concept is like the Wright Brothers’ first flight. It’s a great achievement, but we cannot do business right after that. We need to find business use cases that make airplane travel worth the cost. [We have to] demonstrate that telecoms operators around the world can use APNs without the risk of losing their customers. So this is the journey between proof of concept and proof of business. And of course, we will do a lot of experimentation and many proof works to prove those points.”
There is what looks like another maddening design fail, with the Switch’s left shoulder buttons, L and ZL, positioned on the right of the Mini Arcade Pro’s eight-button layout, with the right-hand R and ZR buttons to their left. However, this is actually a trick borrowed from other console arcade sticks, and it works surprisingly well for 2D fighters such as Ultra Street Fighter II. Capcom’s classic series builds combos from light, medium, and heavy punches and kicks, which is best suited to a six-button layout. Played on a ‘regular’ controller, those inputs usually extend from the four face buttons to the right-hand shoulder buttons. Here, the B, A, and ZR buttons, and the Y, X, and R buttons line up in rows, so the game plays just like it would on an actual cabinet. It’s neat.
However, I wouldn’t use the Mini Arcade Pro to play fighters competitively, even for low-stakes online play. While the joystick feels great, the rest of the inputs feel far from tournament grade. I occasionally noticed overly sensitive “twitchy” controls, where pressing a button once—to select a game in a compendium title, for instance—would result in multiple inputs, even without that aforementioned Turbo feature activated. It’s not a consistent problem, but annoying when it happens.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
As the Mini Arcade Pro is only designed for one player, it feels better suited to arcade puzzlers, shooters, and side-scrolling beat-’em-ups anyway. The Golden Axe games in Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Collection, the entire roster of Capcom Beat-’Em-Up Bundle, and Namco Museum’s Splatterhouse all fared well, as did classics Pac-Man and Galaga. Shooters in particular are where that Turbo feature does come in handy—hold down the Turbo button, then the input you want to apply the feature to, and blast away to your heart’s content. Repeat the process to turn the feature off.
That’s probably not enough to salvage this for most players, though. Unless you’re using your Switch or Switch 2 to near-exclusively play old-school games—or at least old-school style games, like Streets of Rage 4 or Terminator 2D: No Fate—then this has limited appeal. Coupled with the hoops you need to jump through to update it for Switch 2 usage and the abysmal imagery slopped all over the thing, the Mini Arcade Pro isn’t so much retro as it’s better left in the past.
As enterprises and connectivity providers know only too well, artificial intelligence (AI) has fuelled an unprecedented surge in network demand – especially in datacentres. Indeed, the emergence and widespread adoption of agentic AI-enabled applications is also reshaping datacentre requirements, prompting a rapid evolution in networking services.
AI-driven datacentre capacity is projected to grow between two to six times over the next five years. And as AI capacity has soared, network infrastructure is constantly having to adapt to a multitude of external pressures and unprecedented strains. The result is that keeping pace with the next wave of AI growth will require new long-haul networks to enable the rapid scaling of capacity needs in both existing and emerging enterprise setups.
This next generation of networks will have to keep pace with new fibre buildouts and AI datacentre sites, offering extended network capillarity – using short-range radio-access technologies to provide local connectivity to things and devices – and greater overall capacity. And as witnessed and articulated at the latest meeting of the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum in Dallas in October 2025, advanced all-photonic networks (APNs) will almost certainly play a crucial role in achieving such aims.
Led by global tech giant and comms operator NTT, the IOWN project was created to meet the growing needs of the hyper-connected business world of the future, offering a global communications infrastructure capable of enabling ultra high-speed, high-capacity internet services utilising photonics-based technologies, namely an APN. It also aims to address the almost exponentially rising demand for data and a commensurate rise in energy consumption due to the vast amounts of compute power required by future applications, in particular large language model (LLM) use cases.
As it marked its fifth birthday in January 2025, the IOWN Global Forum said its work this year would place an emphasis on updating reference architectures and technologies while developing early adoption use cases across key industries.
Such work is well-needed: research from Neos Networks in October 2025 warned that mass buildout of datacentres in the UK may not come to fruition as mass availability to fibre remains the critical bottleneck that could slow growth, with as many as four-fifths of firms delaying builds because of network infrastructure constraints.
Assessing in April 2025 how to solve these issues, leading research firm Omdia observed in a study, The all-photonics network enables the next-gen digital economy, that to drive the continued growth of the global AI economy, networks would need to evolve significantly to deliver enhanced capabilities. New, advanced optical networks, it said, were necessary to meet advanced application and service requirements and address surging capacity needs within tight capex targets.
Meeting sustainability goals
As well as supporting business agility to match bandwidth supply to service utilisation, the all-photonic networks also offer the opportunity to have infrastructure with lower power consumption per bit to meet sustainability goals and reduce energy costs. To display the crushing need to address the challenge, the Omdia research calculated that when measured in gigawatts, total global datacentre capacity – what the analyst called the key enabling infrastructure for AI capabilities – is set to grow 57% from 2024 to 2027.
The analyst concluded that APNs can potentially bring benefits to all audiences – from individuals and industry to international markets – and noted that the APN will build upon advances in optics technology that offer improved system reach capabilities, cost optimisation, enhanced optical switching, and advances in multi-layer and supplier management supported by the standards community. For enterprises in particular, it sees benefits for those firms looking for greater security, agility and return on investment for their AI and cloud adoption.
Fast forward to the Dallas conference in October, and the point was made that the optimal networks between datacentres will need to be more open and dynamic to support the sharing of computer resources, solving technology problems and moreover creating value for businesses.
The Dallas meeting was the first published event the forum had hosted to advance photonic technologies. It brought together over 240 attendees from more than 170 member organisations for a series of panels, presentations and technology showcases that demonstrated its global scope and latest advances in next-generation network evolution and innovation.
IOWN Global Forum president and chair Katsuhiko Kawazoe notes that since the association’s last public event in Stockholm, it had made “significant” progress.
“[We are] moving from proof-of-concept to proof-of-value, with completed PoCs now demonstrating real-world benefits,” he says. “We’ve also expanded early adoption use cases into remote construction and warehouse management … We’re focused on scaling to real-world deployment, developing reference models and strengthening industry partnerships.”
At the heart of these advances has been an evolution in the development of the APN, which the technology developers in the consortium say has reached the 2.0 stage. NTT’s Masahisa Kawashima, IOWN technology director and head of the technology working group at the IOWN Global Forum, tells Computer Weekly that over the past year, notable developments included work around multi-domain internet networking – enabling interconnection between private fibre networks – and a new packet forwarding architecture using a Hub and Spoke model. These moves are designed to improve efficiency and quality, supporting low latency and introducing deterministic quality of service.
“Multi-domain internet networking means that we can allow multiple organisations to operate their own APN networks and interconnect them to form a seamless network,” he says. “This is very important. Currently, many people are talking about the deployment of private fibre network. For example, datacentre providers will build private fibre networks to connect their distributed datacentre, but without inter-working technology, their optical networks will just form silos in the computing space. With our work, their private fibre networks will be interconnectable to form one computing space, and that would create huge value in this AI computing era.
“Also, we have defined a new architecture regarding the packet forwarding layer. Traditionally, packet networks used to consist of packet forwarding nodes, distributed geographically. But since we have an IOWN APN instead of distributed packet forwarding nodes, we can deploy a packet forwarding function in the cloud and implement a packet forwarding function in a hub and spoke architecture. This will allow us to improve the implementation of the packet forwarding function in terms of efficiency and also quality. For example, we can provide a packet forwarding service with deterministic quality of service and support new data transfer protocols such as RDMA. This has not been possible with today’s packet networks.”
Kawashima compares the latter capabilities to delivery firm FedEx, with its tracking of a packet at all stages from the moment it is sent to a customer. Deterministic quality means that, for example, latency delays can be bound to a specific value and the APN can assure that there would be no packet loss or packet reordering. A key use case for the assignation of a specific value for latency would be finance, where there is a legal requirement for specific minimum throughput speed for a legally recognised trade.
Looking at this application in greater depth, Kawashima adds that in this industry, finance firms have to deploy their transaction systems with databases that perform synchronous data replication, and in that, the latency between two database nodes should be very small. He observed that the use of the IOWN APN would fundamentally improve the performance of two databases being synchronised.
At its heart, the APN is all about ecosystems and is fundamentally built to allow for the use of geographically distributed components, offering the potential to use specifications from consortia like OpenROADM, a standard developed through collaborative work between carriers and vendors to create and promote an open, disaggregated and efficient optical networking ecosystem that allows for flexible, scalable and fully operational networks supporting various services and applications.
Adopting specifications
The IOWN approach is to take advantage of specifications defined by other consortia such as OpenROADM, as adopting such product specifications is helpful in deploying key components of the optical technology ecosystem. Kawashima sees OpenROADM as defining an open architecture. Traditionally, components are deployed in a single place and operated by a single organisation. The IOWN open APN takes advantage of the same components but allows them to be distributed geographically and operated by multiple organisations.
Other key applications considered include traffic control; using digital twins for more efficient management; network operations, particularly in the space of optical transport systems; and streaming video and TV.
The latter was exemplified clearly in May 2025 by Cho Kabuki, a theatre performance synchronising live and virtual performers in both Osaka, Japan and Taipei City, Taiwan using the APN. Even though the 100Gbps optical network between the two cities – created by NTT and Chunghwa Telecom – spanned around 3,000km, it boasted approximately 17ms one-way latency and 33.84ms round-trip time, with no jitter and stable communication.
The new APN was the product of an agreement signed between the two parties in October 2023, and is said to be based on Chunghwa Telecom and NTT’s strengths in optical and wireless transmission technologies, as well as both companies’ achievements in implementing these technologies. It links the Chunghwa Telecom headquarters in Taipei City and NTT’s Musashino R&D Centre in Japan.
Speaking on Cho Kabuki, and the most important lessons learned, Kawashima notes that for him, the standout was the latency of the connection, which made the performance of acceptable quality.
“We used to know that the latency was very important, and using fibres would help us reduce the latency,” he says. “But once we deployed the [APN], what we have found is that the very short latency would help us as if we were in the same place, even if we were remotely separated. I think one of the important findings of the latency [is that it can] help people understand the difference between traditional networks and the IOWN APN.”
AI support
He also believes that what will come next will be another similar project with Chunghwa or another partner attracted by the live streaming use case, and also support for the world of AI.
“I’m expecting that many organisations would consider building a new venue – like a stadium or musical hall – connected with IOWN APN so that the performance there can be live streamed over the IOWN APN,” says Kawashima. “But also [while] the deployment of financial service datacentres is one thing, another thing is remote GPU [graphics processing units]. Many nations are talking about sovereign AI, building an AI computing infrastructure for their country to keep their industry competitive [as regards] global competition.
“One of the important points is how to achieve global sustainability, [and] what we could do with IOWN APN is deploy an AI computing datacentre in rural areas where renewable energy is abundant and connect such areas with downtowns or suburbia where many industries have their R&D campuses. This is what we can do with IOWN APN, because IOWN APN provides high bandwidth, load, agency and transport.”
In part two of our look at the work of the IOWN project, we find out what use cases the association has been working on and when they are likely to come to fruition.
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