2025 focus on early adoption use cases, go-to-market activities and wider industry collaboration

IOWN Global Forum Marks 5th Anniversary with Status Update on Driving Speed-of-Light Technologies

Joe Hatt
IOWN Global Forum
press@iowngf.org

The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (the IOWN Global Forum) is celebrating five years of pioneering the development of high-capacity, ultra-low latency, and power-efficient photonics-based technology, designed to provide new services, foster sustainability and address societal needs worldwide. The Forum is marking this important milestone with a snapshot of its achievements to date and its future activities to support successful implementation.

Founded in January 2020 by NTT, Intel and Sony, the IOWN Global Forum today has over 150 member organizations from across the globe, spanning diverse industries, from construction and financial services to gaming and entertainment as well as webscalers and communication service providers. They include Accenture, Chunghwa Telecom, Ciena, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Google, KDDI, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange and Red Hat, amongst many others. These like-minded companies have come together to address the opportunities and challenges of defining, designing and deploying smarter world solutions by 2030.

Achievements to date

Over the past five years, member organizations of the IOWN Global Forum have collaborated on a series of ground-breaking technical papers, implementation models, proofs of concept, and use case reports. These efforts aim to identify the requirements of real-world applications that can fully leverage next-generation optical networks across various vertical industries.

By utilizing the innovative Open All-Photonics Network (APN) technology, the explored use cases include mobile front-haul, remote direct memory access (RDMA) at the speed of light in cyber-physical systems (CPS), and advanced applications such as network digital twins. Other key areas of focus include green computing powered by remote GPU services for generative AI and large language models, as well as AI-integrated communications (AIC).

Driving market success

From 2025 to 2026, the IOWN Global Forum plans to build on its progress by focusing on driving market success for IOWN technologies. The objectives of the new status update include:

• Updating reference architectures and technologies to continue to drive technological developments and industry trends
• Developing early adoption use cases to demonstrate the value and feasibility of IOWN technologies across key industries
• Driving product readiness to guide innovations from proof-of-concepts to market-ready solutions
• Advancing go-to-market activities by members
• Exploiting new market applicability to capitalize on emerging opportunities and the latest technology
• Reinforcing collaborations with relevant standards organizations and Fora

Future focus

With a holistic approach emphasizing energy efficiency, low latency, high throughput, and determinism, the Forum will focus its efforts on Open APN and Photonics-Electric Convergence technologies. These technologies will serve as the foundation for innovations in fiber sensing, data spaces, digital twin frameworks, security, mobile networking, and data-centric compute and network service.

In addition to exploring future-forward use cases with AIC, the Forum will also address existing markets such as financial services, media production, AI computing, construction, and other CPS applications. For example, the latter use case will encompass life-changing solutions to a range of scenarios including remote surgery, smart manufacturing, smart buildings, real-time disaster notifications, prediction and prevention of disease outbreak, and event-driven security monitoring.

Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe, President and Chairperson of the IOWN Global Forum, commented: “On a worldwide scale, there is ever-increasing demand for power, data and speed across every aspect of our digital lives. But we are reaching the limits of this generation’s communications and infrastructure technology, and a paradigm shift is required. In 2025, the IOWN Global Forum will continue its ground-breaking work on network innovation that will lead to unprecedented advances in communications capacity and latency, computing scalability, and power efficiency, to create a smarter, safer and more sustainable world.”

About the IOWN Global Forum

The IOWN Global Forum was established in 2020 as a private sector organization to develop IOWN technologies and use cases, and is comprised of over 150 organizations. The objective of the IOWN Global Forum is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications, and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, use cases and best practices. For more information, visit IOWN Global Forum – Innovative Optical and Wireless Network.

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