Telecom Trends

Nortel CTO John Roese set out 4 predictions for 2008 in his blog posting this week. He invites his readers to provide their thoughts on what we might expect to see in telecom and IT in 2008.

In many ways, these predictions resonate with some of the themes that I have laid out over the past year:

1. The arrival of WiMax and LTE
2. Unified Communications overtaking VoIP
3. Spectrum Policy diversity leads to multi-mode devices
4. Cranking it up a notch for wireline and optical internet

I have written extensively about Barrett Xplore rolling out wireless broadband solutions to under-served parts of the country. Will WiMax and other fixed wireless technologies, coupled with satellite, provide the solution to universal accessibility to broadband?

Unified Communications allows VoIP to deliver more than PoIP - POTS over IP. Martha Bejar from Microsoft will be delivering the closing keynote address on the first day of The Canadian Telecom Summit, June 16.

We have now seen T-Mobile and AT&T leverage their WiFi hot-spot assets as a means to supplement mobile data networks. In Canada, the wireless carriers have not yet seen WiFi as a competitive differentiator; instead, to date, WiFi assets have been made available to each other's customers. Will unlimited data plans bring a change to how WiFi is strategically deployed in Canada?

A year ago this week, Videotron launched DOCSIS 3.0 powered 100Mbps cable modem service. Which of the Canadian telephone companies will be first to follow Verizon into a residential fibre optic based solution? Robert Depatie of Videotron will again be a keynote speaker at The Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.

What other themes do you think will emerge in 2008?

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John Roese, Nortel, Microsoft, Videotron, AT&T, T-Mobile, Canadian Telecom Summit