Telecom 2030

Ah, predicting the future can be so challenging, but I am going to give it a try.  Yogi Berra said it best, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

If you look at how well the futurists have done predicting the future, the record shows that it is a fool’s game and Yogi really was not harsh enough.  Very few have been able to predict anything substantive about the future.  One person that did quite well at predicting how communications would be carried is Nicholas Negroponte, and here is my posting on his prediction.

A book I read a while back goes through this topic in gory detail as how it relates to technology.  See this link to Amazon.com’s listing–MEGAMISTAKES:  Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change.  Mr. Schnaars’ thesis is that the prognosticators’ problem has been that they focus on large shifts, and the future tends toward incremental rather than fundamental changes.  Think about how you were carried around town when you were a kid.  The difference between that car and the one you drive today is incremental rather than fundamental.  It still has four wheels, an engine, seats, a transmission.  What has changed is that it probably gets twice the gas mileage and has twice the horsepower, and it has more luxury features.

So, why 2030?  Well, I have been in this fair industry about 20 years, and 2030 is about 20 years into the future.  When I was in college, I used a Zenith terminal with a dial up modem operating at 300 bps.  Today, I have cable modem service that I just tested at Speedtest.net at 6.6 Mbps [download speed], so in past 20 odd years my download speed has increased 22,000 times.  I admit I do not expect to have 22,000 times more bandwidth in 20 years, but I would not complain about 145 Gbps to my home.

Telephone service 20 years ago was pretty much just landline service.  I did not get a cell phone until sometime in the 1990s well after I graduated from college and graduate school.  Today, cell phones are ubiquitous, and a report from the United Nations says that 60% of the world’s population has a cell phone.  That is almost 4 billion subscribers to cell phone services worldwide.

So, now for the predictions.  I believe that cell phones will continue to displace landlines, and the end of the landline erosion is not near.  Today, the effect is seen commonly with newly established households, but many established households are canceling their landline phone service.  As more and more of the younger generation establish themselves, fewer and fewer homes will be served by landline phone service.  The cell phone offers just too many advantages, and the costs are rapidly dropping.  Several carriers are now offering unlimited everything (voice, data, messaging) for a mere $50 a month, which is substantially cheaper than comparable landline phone+DSL+unlimited long distance service.  So, I believe in 20 years that landline phone service will be the exception rather than the rule, but it will still be with us.

Broadband data service will continue to become more compelling.  Broadband, delivered with VDSL2, cable, fiber, and wireless, will be commonly available like electricity, and we are already seeing programs that in some ways parallel the Rural Electrification Act.  Access bandwidth will continue to increase, and it is not difficult to conceive of 1 Gbps or higher service to many homes 20 years from now.  This rate is already readily achievable with today’s GPON hardware, so I feel pretty safe.  Competition will intensify between the wireless, cable, and telco providers.  The MSOs and telcos will morph into local access carriers and the terms MSO and telco will have lost their meanings.  They will compete with each other with fiber access technologies.

Video will continue its migration onto the internet.  The prototype for delivery of video 20 years from now is AppleTV, but I think a more open model will prevail.  Call it TV on the Web (WebTV is taken).  Content will be available from innumerable sources, and aggregators will offer channel lineups for bundled pricing.  People will subscribe to the content they actually want to watch rather than the content available from their local cable provider.   Even today’s access rates are sufficient for good service with local storage of content and continuous delivery.

I am unable to predict what will happen with technologies that do not exist today.  Perhaps something in wireless will completely displace wireline, but that is highly unlikely.  Wireline broadband just scales so much better than does wireless broadband.  Every new local loop adds bandwidth to a wireline network.  There is no real limit to what wireline can deliver, whereas with broadcast wireless the spectrum is severely limited.  In 20 years, wireline broadband will likely still have an edge on wireless broadband, but both will have a role.

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