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05.21.07
IT & Telecom Trends in 2007
 By
Dave Gale
I've been asked to give my thoughts on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007 in the Information and Communications Technology market. As usual, this will be a mix of "duh, of course, what do you think!" type stuff and some "what are you smoking" ideas that may well be way off the mark! Here goes:
Obviously the desktop hardware technology "refresh" will get going as IT budgets are approved and laptop and desktops using Intel's new super fast core 2 duo chip's start hitting corporate desks in earnest; followed closely by the early adopters of Microsoft's much awaited new operating system 'Vista'. (The more cautious of us will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2 to appear!)
On the bandwidth front - Broadband, now far from broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. MTN have created a new benchmark with their new offering at around R0.20/MB. It would appear to be a limited duration half-price special, but shows what can be done!
Sentech announced they're providing more bang for buck; lets hope they get their service offering right this time. Vodacom then dropped their price (by 61% according to their ads) after being almost double everyone else's price. iBurst also dropped their pricing, but remain more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages. The unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still an order of magnitude cheaper but don't have the coverage advantage. It is all a bit confusing for the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will make getting online and staying there permanently, more affordable. Offerings should start to differentiate on quality (reliability of throughput) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses - currently not available to ADSL users. This will facilitate hooking up remote offices for voice and data over IP.
More telco's will announce moves to converge their voice and data networks onto IP based New Generation Networks like British Telecom's 21st Century Network project. This will make networks more intelligent and flexible, but will unfortunately not impact on customers for some time to come.
Video on Demand is growing overseas (where real broadband exists) - people are prepared to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to choose their viewing for the evening from their armchair. Don't hold your breath here - we're too spread out geographically to make it profitable just yet. And Telkom still dominates the local loop.
IPTV is being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Again, dependent 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 will hardly make a dent in Nokia's global market dominance.
Instant Messaging (IM) will continue to grow. Local mobile phone based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways of "growing up" and becoming more respectable. IM will start making deeper inroads into corporate culture with IT managers needing to develop policies on IM usage.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Dave Gale is the Business Development Director at Storm Telecommunications in South Africa. Storm prioritise taking the time to analyse your business' Internet requirements in detail and we are serious about Customer Service.
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