IT and telecommunications trends in 2007

I have been asked to give my opinion on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007 in the Information and Communication Technologies market. As usual, this will be a mix of “duh, of course, what do you think!” write things down and some ideas of “what are you smoking?” which may well be out of place.

Here it goes:

obviously the desktop hardware technology the “upgrade” will roll out as IT budgets are approved and laptops and desktops using Intel’s new super-fast core 2 duo chip start hitting corporate desktops in earnest; closely followed by early adopters of Microsoft’s long-awaited new ‘Vista’ operating system. (The more cautious will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2!)

About him bandwidth front – Broadband, now far from being broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. MTN has created a new benchmark with its new offer at around R0.20/MB. It would appear to be a limited time half price special, but it shows what can be done!

Sentech announced that they are providing more value for money; let’s hope they get their service offer right this time. Vodacom then lowered its price (by 61% according to its ads) after nearly doubling the price of everyone else. iBurst has also lowered its prices, but is still more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages. Unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still much cheaper, but don’t have the benefit of coverage. It’s all a bit confusing to the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will connect and stay there permanently, more affordable. The offers should start to differentiate in quality (performance reliability) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses, which are currently not available to ADSL users. This will make it easy to connect remote offices for voice and data over IP.

More telcos will announce moves to converge your voice and data networks in new generation IP-based networks, such as British Telecom’s 21st Century Network project. This will make networks smarter and more flexible, but unfortunately won’t affect customers for some time.

Video on Demand is growing abroad (where real broadband exists): People are willing to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to pick their late night viewing from their armchair. Don’t hold your breath here: we’re too geographically dispersed for it to be profitable yet. And Telkom still dominates the local loop.

IPTV it’s being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Once again, dependency on broadband and ownership of content will be key. It will not be over the Internet, but over managed IP networks.

Music and video downloads, both legal and illegal, continue to grow. More cell phones with better mp3 players will eventually make people wonder why they have a CD player, but probably not this year! Apple’s iPhone will develop a cult following, but it’s unlikely to dent Nokia’s global market dominance.

Instant messaging (IM) will continue to grow. The local mobile phone-based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways to “grow up” and become more reputable. IM will begin to penetrate more deeply into the corporate culture and IT administrators will need to develop policies around the use of IM.

WiMAX equipment will drop in price as economies of scale kick in and more networks, in addition to Sprint Nextel in the US, make massive deployments. It will continue to disappoint those who believed all the hype of 70 Mbps at 70 miles at 70 mph. Some WiFi mesh networks will appear here in SA, whether legal or not, and we will continue to see a LAN technology play out in open spaces that it was never designed for. Unlicensed mobile access, with VoWiFi phones behind it, making mobile networks nervous.

Spectrum is being fiercely contested. It is a scarce resource and it is unlikely that anyone other than a few established players will obtain licenses. There will be many frustrated applicants.

Municipal networks are taking center stage, with Cape Town’s tender awarded but questioned, eThekweni set to roll but caught up in legalities, and the city of Joburg now up for bid. They are unlikely to have any real impact this year. They don’t really have much of a long-term sustainable advantage, as they will have to allow others to access the infrastructure and you will find that building a telecommunications company is not trivial.

Tea Mobile networks will announce HSUPA with great fanfare. Mobile broadband will then be as wide as possible for a while, but as upload and download speeds will be around 5 Mbps, it will make quadplay (or fourplay?) possible: mobile/voice/internet/video.

Mobile interconnection prices will fall by 20 to 25% shortly. This should allow Telkom to lower the price of calls to mobile phones; It will be necessary to see if they will transfer the full benefit or not. However, mobile packages are unlikely to change as a result. Least cost routing will become more and more marginal and the shift towards communication service providers using VoIP will become more obvious.

Asterisk, the open source “IPPBX” will continue to do some forays into the PBX market, with damage done at a “higher level” in the market than originally proposed: medium and large companies instead of SMEs. Take a look at the call centers here: they are the weather vane of change.

Hosted IPPBXs will start to emerge as broadband improves and investors in some of the early VoIP entrants who committed large capital expenditures on these types of solutions are looking to get the ROI moving.

Social networks using web applications such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Second Life, etc. they will become more widely known and used as people get used to being online 24/7. We are seeing South African flavors of these appear.

DSL and SSL VPN will become more popular as DSL prices go down and quality improves and mobile broadband producers. Businesses will be looking for help setting up and managing increasingly complex networks of devices.

As broadband improves in performance, price, and reliability, ASP services will become more popular, and businesses will seriously consider (but may not yet commit to) things like Getting Things Done, Gmail, and Google’s Office suites instead. of Microsoft (from one evil empire to another!?).

VoIP [http://www.storm.co.za/voip2.q] it will start to emerge as more than just a cost-saving exercise with some of the first real value-adds starting to appear, with integration into calendars, address books, CRM and PBX.

There will be a lot of consolidation in the next few yearswith larger players buying smaller, niche players to meet the need for a broader voice and data offering.

Oh, and Neotel will start to take on Telkom in the retail market and Infraco will make its awkward and controversial way onto the stage…