Connectivity World and Data Centre World jointly organized a Tech Forum that brought together the main players in the value chain of the connectivity, telecommunications and data center sector. Executives from leading companies and the main global technology operators participated in a meeting in which they were able to discuss the main challenges for the coming years.

The event was led by a panel composed of the Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of LaLiga, Miguel Angel Leal, and Francisco Porras, based in the data center unit of Merlin Properties, and moderated by the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services of Madrid, institutional partner of Madrid Tech Show.

In just five years, fiber optic coverage has reached 90% of homes in Spain, making it the country with the highest FTTH penetration rate in the European Union and the leading European economy in terms of number of installations. These data show the consistency of Spain's leadership in connectivity and its key geostrategic position in the connection of submarine cables.

However, many of those present agreed not to be complacent. Although the extent of deployment is increasing, we are still far from reaching the full potential that 5G will offer in the form of new technologies and smart cities. In addition, other international European markets are vying to become hotbeds of development through economic promotion, tax incentives and other investment enablers.

Regarding the latter, the projection of the cities of the future involves the installation of edge data centers, or in other words, data centers close to the edge, at the origin of the data, which will increase the speed of data transmission, reduce latency and multiply the possibilities of connecting facilities and devices in cities and homes themselves.

This type of installation is more widely used than industrial environments, allowing the automation of production processes and analytics, generating predictive models and connecting multiple devices with the use of emerging technologies such as IoT.

The location of data centers, their sustainability and carbon footprint and the diversification of facilities were some of the main axes that made up the debate established by the main critical infrastructure managers present.