As has been our custom for over a decade, today we’ll look back at the predictions we made a year ago and see how well we did with our crystal ball, then next time we’ll look forward with some 2012 predictions about convergence, VoIP and unified communications.
After years of predicting and waiting for 4G, one year ago we held out hope that 4G/LTE wireless would make an impact in 2011 not just by offering faster broadband, but by providing an infrastructure for a broader portfolio of mobile applications. This year, we’ve seen wide-scale deployment of 4G/LTE, and some progress on enterprise-grade apps that take advantage of faster mobile broadband. But alas, we’re still waiting for a true VoIP over LTE solution. Maybe next year.
BACKGROUND: Verizon LTE will cover 185M people by year-end, says CTO
We expected 2011 to be a banner year for HD video conferencing in the SME market, and we weren’t disappointed. The wider acceptance of mobile HD video was an unforeseen bonus, although we think there is still room for progress by better integrating collaboration applications
We predicted that the real battle for net neutrality would just be getting started in 2011, and we think we hit the mark on this prediction. Yes, the FCC put its rules into effect, and lawsuits from the likes of Verizon and the Wireless Association were not far behind. The U.S. Congress tried to thwart the FCC on net neutrality, but the legislation went nowhere in the U.S. Senate. No doubt more excitement to follow in 2012.
NET NEUTRALITY: Implementation measured in the details
We suggested that SMBs would more widely accept SIP services in 2011, and while we don’t have hard numbers to prove it, the increased carrier competition for SIP network services in the SMB market suggests that our predicted growth is underway.
We also expect hosted and cloud based services (including software as a service) to continue their growth in the large enterprise market, extending their usefulness to the small business and medium enterprise tier and we were spot-on with our predictions. In fact, 2011 was a very “cloudy” year with new service introductions ranging from Verizon’s hosted contact center upgrades via a partnership with inContact, to Cisco’s CloudVerse framework, to multiple BroadSoft portfolio additions.
Finally, we predicted and saw a banner year for service provider consolidation — counting more than a dozen mergers or acquisitions as carriers grew both their footprints along with their unified communication and hosted services portfolios — most notable were CenturyLink with Qwest and Savvis, EarthLink with One Communications, and Windstream with PAETEC.
