As it marked its firth birthday in January 2025, the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (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, and its latest has seen the trade association sign an agreement to accelerate further collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
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 future global communications infrastructure capable of enabling ultra high-speed, high-capacity internet services utilising photonics-based technologies, namely an all-photonics network (APN).
It is principally a response to the current and future demands placed on networks by artificial intelligence (AI) and its technology ecosystem. As AI-driven data centre growth soars, network infrastructure is constantly having to adapt to a multitude of external pressures and unprecedented strains, even on current global optical architectures. 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.
The proposed new network and information processing infrastructure includes terminals that can provide high-speed, high-capacity communication using technology focused on optics, as well as large computational resources. In its mission, NTT is being supported by the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Sony, Ciena, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Orange, Telefónica and Google.
In their collaboration, the ITU – the United Nations agency for digital technologies – and the IOWN Global Forum said that they will work together to achieve “a more sustainable and smarter world on a global scale”. In signing their agreement, the organisations said they recognised the importance of “innovative” network and computing infrastructure utilising photonics technologies and agreed to cooperate in global standardisation activities, including developing countries, as well as to cooperate in ITU’s education programs on advanced optical technologies.
THE ITU agreement comes after the IOWN Global Forum’s 2025 Annual Member Meeting in Stockholm. The meeting began with, Hakan Jevrell, Sweden’s state secretary to the minister for international development and foreign trade, telling delegates that as the next generation of digitisation takes shape, businesses are having to deal with increasing organisational challenges, as well as uncertainties from the recent US tariff announcements and other geopolitical crises, and this has increased the need to develop systems and services that will allow business to remain relevant.
The event also saw the launch of a whitepaper by research firm Omdia, The all-photonics network enables the next-gen digital economy, which laid bare the need to address the potential energy crisis driven by AI. It calculated that when measured in gigawatts, the total global datacentre capacity – what the analyst called the key enabling infrastructure for AI capabilities – is set to grow 57% from 2024 to 2027.
This, said Omdia, placed a number of future needs for network infrastructure such as even greater bandwidth to address surging capacity needs within tight capex targets; lower latency to meet advanced application and service requirements across diverse sectors; lower power consumption per bit to meet sustainability goals and reduce energy costs; cloud-like agility to match bandwidth supply to service utilisation; and greater network robustness and security to ensure resilience against natural and man-made disruption.
The analyst added that to achieve these aims, the next generation of optical network will have to keep pace with new fibre buildouts to new AI datacentre sites, with extended network capillarity (using short-range radio-access technologies to provide local connectivity to things and devices) and greater overall capacity. Omdia said it regarded the IOWN APN as potentially playing a crucial role in meeting these challenges.
