The world’s leading broadband conference and exhibition, the Broadband World Forum, brought broadband to life last week, as over 8,000 decision-makers from across the globe congregated at Amsterdam’s RAI Exhibition Centre. With smart cities, e-learning, digital innovations and consumer-centric strategies high on the agenda, the three-day programme included keynote sessions, a choice of five tracks each day, special seminars, the exclusive Executive Summit and the prestigious InfoVision Awards.

With over 400 speakers, the conference comprised of the industry’s top visionaries, innovators and operators, including Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent, who spoke on the Opening Day about the services and technologies that will enable us to “revolutionise how we interact with each other, and content, media and services from the cloud.” Eric Hoving, Group CTO of KPN, and the event’s host operator, also joined Day One’s conference and began by highlighting how KPN’s LTE network offered 23Mbps download speeds within the RAI. Hoving shared his thoughts on the future and echoed Weldon in saying the demand from tablets will make operators redesign their networks and that as access to the internet becomes predominantly mobile, the sites users access will have to adapt. Wing Lee, CEO of Malaysian provider, YTL spoke proudly of YTL’s collaboration with the online learning platform Frog, while Google’s General Manager of Google Fiber, Kevin Lo, highlighted the success of the company’s FTTH network.

Day Two’s conference was kicked off by Ulf Ewaldsson, Senior VP and CTO of Ericsson, who celebrated the success that the industry is enjoying and stressed that with 1.1billion users on Facebook, 400 million daily Tweets, and 100 billion downloads of apps on Smartphones, networks are truly performing. Looking to the future, Ewaldsson believes operators should be ecosystemtic and willing to partner with others in the eco-system. Tom Stanton, Chairman and CEO of USA firm Adtran, followed and focussed on the reasons for the accelerated rate of change in the industry. Day Two also saw Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission deliver a pre-recorded message which focused on the European broadband industry and gave an update on the Digital Agenda’s targets. Axel Clauberg, VP of Deutsche Telekom, followed with his views on stripping out legacy network elements and adopting a streamlined approach, while Balan Nair from Liberty Global called for the whole industry to move to volume based billing.

The third and final day of the conference focussed on smart cities, which was particularly fitting with the City of Amsterdam being named as 2013’s World Smart Capital. Pierre-Yves Senghor, Chief Marketing Officer of smart metering operator M20 Smart City, started proceedings by exploring smart sensors, with Peter Molengraaf, CEO of Amsterdam smart city operator Alliander, following with a summary of what smart cities are all about – using technology to improve the quality of life of real people. Matthew Hall, Chief Commercial Officer of London City Airport, went on to speak about the various smart and clever connected technologies employed in the airport. Day three’s agenda was concluded with keynotes from Daniel Danker, Chief Product Officer of Shazam, Tristan Nitot, the Principal Founder and Evangelist for Firefox, and Michael Abbatista, Global Head of Telco Partnerships at Spotify, who described the services’ meteoric rise over the last few years.

Mark Dawson, Research Manager and Head of Content and Partnerships for the Broadband World Forum, says: “It’s an exciting time for broadband and by including the hottest subjects in our agenda, along with the calibre of our speakers and the amount of operators and vendors, we have truly reflected the evolving marketplace. As the industry strives to deliver faster download speeds and meet consumer demand, our focus has been very much on innovations for the delivery of fixed and wireless broadband, network architecture and monetisation opportunities. With many exhibitors already signed up for next year, we look forward to staging yet another successful event in 2014.”

Bringing broadband to life alongside the conference was an exhibition that featured over 200 leading manufacturers and solution providers. With a diverse spread of companies taking part, the exhibition floor witnessed an array of exciting activity, from product launches and demos, to presentations and exclusive showcases. Adding to this, the show floor was buzzing with content hubs, a private meeting room village and dedicated networking zones.

The event this year saw a significant surge in attendance from C-level Executives with this industry leading keynote line up, as well as the highly exclusive Executive Summit hosted by Telstra, and the Broadband InfoVision Awards and Gala Dinner.

Following the huge success of this year’s event, Informa Telecoms & Media can confirm that Broadband World Forum 2014 will return to the RAI Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam. The organisers have confirmed that the dates for next year’s Broadband World Forum are 21 – 23 October 2014. For further information, visit http://www.broadbandworldforum.com/ or follow @BBWorldForum or use #BBWF to gain sneak previews about next year. To view all of the keynote video interview from his year’s conference, please visit http://www.telecoms.com/category/format/telecoms-tv/interviews-tv/.