Jiri’s Notepad

The Register quoting John McHugh

Wi-Fi access, he thinks, will be robust, universal and properly billed. “It will be the time mobility comes of age. It will achieve the level of robustness, accounting reliability and security which people expect. Wi-Fi account billing will be supported in most public hot spots. […]He also predicted that 10 gigabit Ethernet over copper to the desktop would be being deployed.

But VoIP would still not have swept away conventional phone networks. “It will continue to be installed on a case by case and account by account basis, but it will take 10, 15, 20 years before the old system is swept away - just look how long Token Ring lasted after it died. VoIP will continue to overtake TDM, and will win over customers one by one. But there’s no ‘hockey stick’ coming in VoIP.”

Video calling, however, will still be unused. “People simply won’t use it, because they don’t like using it,” he predicted.

And storage would, finally, start being a standard Ethernet based service, rather than a series of highly proprietary storage area network technologies.

And Unified Network Access? “We can predict that Trusted computing will announce yet another unified access protocol, and will still struggle with achieving relevance,” he said. “We can also predict that the cycle of replacing the dominant networking company will continue; so where Cabletron replaced IBM, where 3Com replaced Cabletron, where Cisco replaced 3Com, someone will replace Cisco as the industry leader.