TeliaSonera's Vlad Ihora

No, definitely not a surprise, because it's intrinsically linked with the evolution of social networking. If you want to see it from a business perspective, it's pretty good for Zynga to have an alliance with Facebook, do revenue sharing, and so on.

I think the question comes, as they've already reached the critical mass, they now have to make the games a bit more interesting - and that becomes a bit more exciting for the operators all of a sudden. Until now it's been a very low demand kind of area from a connectivity perspective - the most important part has just been keeping it online. If it's there and available, there's no real question of delay or packet loss, but as they start to develop a bit further it starts to get interesting on the applications side.

From a technical quality perspective the most important servers to be kept protected are the database servers or billing servers, because those are the live elements - and there aren't that many. I think from a trend perspective these are the companies that will be most interested in virtualised services in the future - where you can scale up and down quite easily, instead of having to just go for dedicated platforms.

It makes a lot of sense - it's a very fluctuating-focused sort of business, whereas the dedicated platforms are for games which demand a really strong presence and a lot of exchange with the servers.

In general we've noticed a lot more openness to the outsourcing idea - there's been a period of centralisation within the industry, obviously, with companies involved in mergers and acquisitions, and unfortunately some that have failed as well. But in general there's far more focus on how the whole infrastructure thing works - and instead of people coming in and spending a whole bunch on hundreds of servers, people have become far more interested in the outsourcing thing.

Obviously remote gaming is a very important part of the future. Unfortunately it's not necessarily a strong part of the present as yet. It's not anything to do with OnLive or other such companies, in terms of their algorithms or service in itself - it has a lot to do with the rest of the components in the value chain.

Look at it from a very basic perspective - who do you have as part of the value chain? You have the end user, who will obviously want the advantage of not having to pay for a console... although console prices have been dropping... Then you have the network itself from the operator, and then the connectivity to the global internet.

The choice of where the actual servers for OnLive and other such operators will be placed will be the first point at which it will be established just how these services are going to work. Secondly it will be how they can secure the points between the servers and the end-users.

From a technical standpoint nothing is impossible - techies love a challenge - but when you mix the technical with the business, it becomes a question of how the members of the value chain will benefit from allowing these services to exist and prosper.

There are have been tests that show the feasibility of the product on a dedicated fibre optic line - perfect, no question about it. It's not a shot in the dark, but I think it would be interesting for companies like OnLive and others to work with the likes of us and our peers, just to try it out - see how it works.

If you don't do anything about the network I can tell you now it's not going to work - there will be clogs and issues with round-trip delay. So how would it work if you try and create that linkage between operators and their networks to make sure there is a certain quality of service which allows for these products.

The idealism is to be commended, but the reality is slightly different.

If you want to put it on a regional basis, I'd say... looking into the way that broadband networks are being deployed and upgraded around the world I'd say Asia would be the number one to benefit. Maybe South Korea would be the first location to have something operational on this level - but again, with the OnLive servers placed in South Korea. You're looking at the South Korean internet, more or less.

From a regionalisation perspective, South Korea could be live with OnLive or other services, followed I think very closely by Western Europe or the US. The segmentation of types of network providers, and the type of fibre deployments in Western and Northern Europe is tremendous - there's a lot more focus on that in the UK, France and Germany.

Provided the OnLives will adopt a more local, rather than regional approach, then it could become realistic within one and a half years, shortly after Asia.