… is of course, AT&T’s CIO and CTO (and a few other things as well). He gave a talk at Harvard last week. These are his top ten technology trends, as reported by David Weinberger:
10. Ethernet everywhere. Home LANs proliferate. Bandwidth is the
killer app. Just about everything will have Ethernet connectivity.9. Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business — moving from information managing.
Vendor dependency > Open networks, architecture and API
8. Wireless and wired lines will converge. Accelerating
virtualization. Wire line communication will be history by 2020.
Already, the number of wireless lines exceeds the number of wire lines.7. Broadband will be the death of locality. When you get an
IP-based infrastructure, geography means nothing. Martha Stewart’s 212
number rang in her cell in Virginia.6. e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace, enabled by speech recognition.
5. Sensor networks everywhere. We need lots more addresses. We
need IPv6 which gives enough for every millimeter of the planet. E.g.,
cars will have IP addresses so you can have them tuned as you drive.
(Hence, lots of sensors.)4. "Wireless internet will be big." Moore’s Law says that in 2010 we’ll have 40mb/second. In 2020 we get 1gb/sec. We’ll need quantum computing for this.
3. Convergence of communications and apps will be real: The
network will be the computer. Most of the work will be done on the
edges.2. Security is critical. We need a better infrastructure or we’ll have a virus hitting our computer every 5 seconds.
1. IP will eat everything. In 15-20 years, it will be application-based routing.
In 2010, we’ll have self-healing networks. They’ll have cognitive intelligence. We’ll have cognitive radio, eliminating the need for FCC to regulate spectrum. Speech-to-speech translation.
2015: Network moves from hardware based to software based: on-demand, reconfigurable.
2020: Last phone number will be retired because we’ll all be
wireless. Holographic storage. Tele-immersion. Holographic
teleconferencing.