The Broadband World Forum, held for the first time in the RAI Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam, has been hailed a success following an exciting opening day that highlighted how broadband has the ability to transform lives.

The conference and exhibition kicked off with the European Union’s Digital Agenda Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, who took to the stage to call on policy makers to spur network investment as a matter of urgency. Kroes, who is a real thought leader and key driver of the Digital Agenda, said that Europe was at a crossroad in broadband and warned that the continent is slipping behind other regions in terms of broadband availability, which if left unchecked, will have dire economic consequences as more and more business is conducted online. In October, Kroes called on operators to lobby their governments for the release of €9.2 billion from the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility, which could go towards broadband infrastructure deployment in underserved areas. At the Broadband World Forum, Kroes echoed this call-out by highlighting that an additional 45 million homes would benefit, as well as the wider economy.

Ericsson’s CTO, Ulf Ewaldsson, emphasized the importance of innovation in networking technology and declared that we are on the brink of the ‘Networked Society’ – with 85% of all the world covered with 2G voice, 45% population coverage with 3G and 5% covered by 4G system, which he expects to reach 50% in the next five years. He also predicted that the development of the network would spur the creation of innovative network aware devices, such as helmets and goggles and, using the example of the iPhone 5, new devices on the network would build the brand on the device side. He said: “This kind of innovation of never-ending innovation is a loop between consumer demand and network capacity and capability.”

The impressive speaker line-up saw Hunter Walk, Head of Product Management at Google, explain how YouTube has become a global living room by bringing entertainment and events to people across the globe. In the lead up to the conference, Walk commented: “YouTube is most successful when we help the community succeed so we always ask ourselves ‘how can we make this better?’.”

The opening day also saw a keynote from KPN, the leading telecommunications and incumbent service provider in The Netherlands. In Germany and Belgium, KPN pursues a multi-brand strategy in its mobile operations and holds number three market positions through E-Plus and BASE. KPN’s CEO, Eelco Blok, said the Netherlands represented a gigabit society and that new services would come online from e-health, enhanced personal safety and energy services.

Following the success of the Olympics, Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London 2012 Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, joined the impressive list of speakers. Pennell provided insight into the delivery of a connected Olympic Games and emphasized how large scale connectivity for smartphones is now considered part of daily life.

Several press conferences took place throughout the day, including the Broadband Forum event. Here it launched its TR-069 certification program (BBF.069 CPE), where the first companies in the world achieved certification on a day when the Forum also revealed that broadband subscriptions had passed 624 million. Broadcom, Cisco, D-Link, Huawei and Lantiq were the first successful companies to achieve the certifications at the official testing laboratory, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). The program has been developed to verify if devices are compliant to TR-069, also known as the CPE WAN Management Protocol, which is the remote management standard used around the world to provision and manage the connected home.

The event also saw an array of exciting activity from exhibitors, including Lantiq, who showcased their access networks and home gateway solutions; ZTE who launched a full hardware and software solution integrating low bit rate high definition, OTT TV , and multi-screen convergence; Adtran who provided live presentations of the industry’s first cloud-based mobile offload architecture; and Mindspeed Technologies Inc., who demonstrated its leading-edge solutions for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure and services.