Another tradition round these parts to help fill that awkward New Year news slot is the “look forward to the year ahead” story.
Here, as ever, we try to predict what will be appearing in our radar screens in the 12 months ahead. Since this is a very imprecise science, the predictions fall into three main categories: likely, plausible and just about believable if you get to the end and read that it’s America.
Line rental
BT phone line rental is re-branded as a transfer connection rental to signify its dual data/voice capability… and to tidy up business for users who route their voice calls via another carrier.
Voice over IP
Broadband telephony gets even more massive than it is already. Much confusion ensues about where to plug in your handset.
ISPs/broadband providers
2006 sees further consolidation in the marketplace and hence fewer providers as mergers become more pressing. Connection speeds go up and prices come down. Dial up all but disappears as an internet access option from the largest ISPs.
Google and Yahoo!
The big two continue their tussle. Google maintains its lead through further acquisitions. Yahoo! carries on playing catch up but springs at least one surprise on its rival during the course of the year. Microsoft makes some headway in challenging Google, but other issues divert its attention and energy.
Search engines
Search engines dream up new ways of presenting information, allowing a more personalised search experience. Some search engines even allow users to pay and have the adverts stripped out.
E-learning
The uptake of broadband gives e-learning a much needed boost, bringing the virtual classroom alive with video conferencing. Evening classes, kicking in as they do as winter nights draw in, hits the market at exactly the right time. All manner of subjects are taught online, brewing your own bio-diesel from chip pan fat is one of the surprise hits of the 2006 evening class curriculum.
Spam
A good fairy smites the spammers, thus instantly ending the daily flow of emails offering ‘performance’ enhancing drugs, cheap mortgages and university degrees.
Webcams
Mobile broadband becomes cheaper and universal to such an extent that some people strap webcams to their heads and broadcast what they get up to 24 hours a day. Sadly, it catches on and soon becomes compulsive viewing for many.
The most successful webcam-loggers are approached by advertisers for prime time slots. Not to be outdone, other webcam-loggers find more innovative ways to cash in, including auctioning off days of their lives and handing control over to the successful bidder, and dreaming up dares and selling them to highest bidder.
CCTV
Riding on the bow wave of the webcam-loggers, CCTV operators decide to get in on the act by offering live coverage to subscribers. Companies that monitor road traffic flows are the most popular.
Also getting high viewing figures are the pay per view CCTV operators peddling both live coverage and edited highlight clips from their archives. Concerns are expressed over civil liberties and royalties to the ‘performers’. Many public places, in the risk-averse compo-culture in which we live, erect signs warning about CCTV cameras and issue optional headgear that automatically pixelates the wearer’s face if any footage is broadcast. Fortunately, the boffins configure the system to enable pixel hat wearers to be readily identifiable when viewed from within the CCTV system itself, thus averting a crime spree in UK shopping malls.
