Text 21752, 195 rader
Skriven 2008-10-10 17:21:54 av Russell Tiedt (5:7105/1)
Ärende: Internet commentary
===========================
Hello everybody.

Here is a commentary, that appeared on News24.co.za this morning ... , with 
regard to the development in 10 years ... , a little different from mine ...

The internet in 10 years time - Arthur Goldstuck

The next 10 years in the life of the internet must be seen in the context of 
the last 10 years. And it's going to be less about the technology than about 
the people who use it.

In 1998, the number of internet users in South Africa passed the million mark 
for the first time, almost doubling over the previous year. Before long, it 
seemed, everyone would be online.

The number doubled again in the next two years, and internet nirvana appeared 
imminent. But then growth ground to a near-halt, and the year 2000 total of 
2.4 million users will have doubled again only by the end of 2009.

This is despite the fact that we saw a revolution in access technologies in 
the past decade, with the slow modems of 1998 giving away to fixed line 
broadband in the form of ADSL and wireless broadband in flavours ranging from 
3G to iBurst to WiMAX.

From a speed limit of 56kbps, which condemned you to calling up a typical 
online banking page in about 30 to 60 seconds or more, the speed limit for 
ordinary home users now is a blazing 4Mbps for ADSL and up to 7.2Mbps for 3G. 
In both cases, that same page appears to load instantaneously.

The result is that it is no longer about the technology we use, but rather 
what we do with that technology. As of 2008, despite those apparently amazing 
speeds, we are still severely hamstrung - or rather, bottlenecked - by the 
fact that we have both a speed limit and a data download limit.

The typical user has a limit or cap of either 1Gb of data or 3Gb - often hyped 
as allowing so many thousand pages of a book or so many hundred songs to be 
downloaded. The truth is that, if you regularly use some of the internet's 
more data-hungry applications, like Facebook or Second Life, that cap will 
barely last a week.

But from 2009 to 2012, the future will begin to arrive a whole lot faster. 
Right now, the key resource that dictates data allocation and cost in South 
Africa is the SAT3/SAFE undersea cable controlled by Telkom.

It provides a total of 30 Gigabits per second bandwidth to SA, and is doled 
out by Telkom as a precious gift.

Bandwidth will have grown

In July 2009, the new Seacom undersea cable, commissioned primarily by second 
network operator Neotel, will enter service. It's bandwidth capacity? 1,2 
Terrabits per second, or 40 times that of the present SAT3 cable.

SAT3 is likely to be upgraded to its maximum capacity, around 320 Gigabytes 
per second, by 2010. And sometime between 2010 and 2012, depending on how fast 
Government Time catches up to real time, the new Infraco cable, initiated by 
the Department of Public Enterprises, will enter service with a bandwidth 
promise of about 3,8 Terrabytes per second.

The EASSy cable, being planned by a consortium of East African countries and 
telecoms players, may add another 680 Gigabit per second by then.

This means that five years from now, by 2013, our miserly 30Gbps of bandwidth 
will have grown to 6Tbps, or 200 times what we have now. That will have five 
dramatic effects:

# It will bring down the cost of bandwidth to something closer to its real 
cost, rather than what an elite market is willing to tolerate;

# It will make the current concept of data caps seem absurd, as the cost of 
each additional Megabyte of data comes down to fractions of a cent, rather 
than a few Rand;

# It will speed up internet adoption as cheap bandwidth adds to the momentum 
of the Government's universal access policies. But don't expect the masses to 
flock to the use of broadband, when the infrastructure does not exist to 
support widespread computer access.

# It will make high definition video or TV via the internet a reality, 
bringing down the cost of video distribution, making video-on-demand (choosing 
any movie you want to watch at any time) a reality, and possibly even allowing 
personal TV stations to come into being. An 8Mbps connection, which is likely 
to be fairly common by 2013, will be good enough for receiving DVD-quality 
video content. By 2018, we may well have speeds, probably for more affluent 
users, of up to 27Mbps, which is ideal for high definition (HD) video content 
- right now the ultimate in visual content quality.

# The pace of innovation on the internet and in broadcasting will accelerate, 
and South Africa's competitiveness in the digital economy will rise as 
internet users take advantage of the fast, cheap environment to experiment, 
innovate and compete online.

One unforeseen (by most) consequence of all this bandwidth is that available 
content will mushroom even more dramatically than it has in the past decade. 
The information glut will become an information slum, and it will seem 
impossible for individuals to find their way to the best or most useful 
content, or at least to find their way through the useless content that will 
litter the internet, and possibly even TV.

# The solution to this will be information mapping at a level, on a scale and 
with built-in intelligence such as we have never seen before. An entire 
industry sector will emerge around the concept of mapping information, with 
the likes of Google and Wikipedia eventually being seen as the forerunners, 
but not the owners, of that space.

Thanks to two seemingly unconnected phenomena - the growing digital divide 
that results from illiteracy and lack of computer literacy, and the apparent 
shortening attention spans of youths and young adults, devices will also 
evolve to take into account the need for a more visual way of interacting with 
information.

All screens, from phones to laptops to kiosks, will become touch screens, and 
all menus will be icon-based. Standards bodies will eventually decide on 
universal meanings for a wide range of information icons.

The cellphone will no longer be the means through which mobile networks manage 
their customers, but rather through which cellphone owners manage their 
information and communications lives, choosing which provider they will use 
for which purpose.

Airtime contracts will give way to data contracts that allow the user to make 
calls using Voice over IP, or voice over the internet, which consumes data 
capacity rather than airtime - since all phones will have VoIP built in, and 
the cost of data will have fallen far enough to make this the logical means of 
making calls.

At the same time, digital TV will become the primary means for the mass market 
to interact with information, but with a lot of help from their cellphones, 
which will be a more effective return path or feedback mechanism than the 
set-top boxes being envisaged by the Government right now.

Mass adoption of the internet

Once cellphones and digital TVs can talk to each other, in the electronic 
sense, both devices will come into their own as information access, sharing 
and transmission devices.

This combination will also allow the cellphone to come into its own as an 
internet access device. Right now, one needs to have a working knowledge of 
the internet to be able to access it on the cellphone, which why 
internet-enabled cellphoines are not creating a dramatic rise in internet 
usage by the have-nots of our society.

Digital TV will allow for an experience of a version of the internet on a 
large screen, which will provide the experience that can then be translated to 
the small screen. This means that, by 2018, we will only begin to see mass 
adoption of the internet in South Africa.

While the digital have-nots begin to become haves, it will just get better and 
better for the haves - as it has been for the past five years. One thing that 
will get worse is the availability of radio spectrum, which means that we will 
have traffic jams in the transmission of wireless broadband signals.

As the demand for data usage and speed rises, and the availability of wireless 
bandwidth remains static, the first moves will begin towards something called 
fibre to the home (FTTH), which is essentially an extremely high capacity line 
running into the home directly from the fibre optic networks that are being 
laid down in South Africa?s urban streets right now.

While telecoms operators have their hands full getting their cables in the 
ground in order to support data services to corporations and to keep data 
moving fast between the base stations that support their wireless networks, no 
one has time to think about FTTH.

But with the arrival not only of cheaper and faster bandwidth, but also of 
content that demands even faster bandwidth, FTTH looks like the only long-term 
solution. Expect to see business plans for FTTH emerge by 2013, and the first 
roll-outs to begin by 2018.

Meanwhile, due to the low cost of bandwidth, free WiFi or WIMAX hotspots will 
be available at most commercial hospitality or entertainment establishments, 
as a marketing tool or drawcard for an increasingly data-oriented society.

That will be one of the potential positive spin-offs of the 2010 World Cup, as 
all of Hospitality South Africa tries to find a way to attract visitors to 
their offerings.

But the 2010 World Cup will not transform South Africa on its own, even if it 
ends up taking the credit.

It will have occurred at a time when a revolution in access technologies and 
cost of access had already begun. The World Cup will be an early beneficiary, 
and may even fool us into believing that we have finally arrived in the future 
that the internet has allowed us to envisage for the past decade. But that 
future is still ten years away.

# Arthur Goldstuck heads the World Wide Worx research organisation - a pioneer 
in the South African market in the use of the internet as a tool for 
productivity.


Russell

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5
 * Origin: Rusty's BBS - Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa (5:7105/1)