* How Steve and Larry did last year in the prognostication department
Today, we’d like to look back a year and see how we did in our predictions for 2003.
We’ll start with predictions that were pretty close to the mark. Videoconferencing over IP became THE mainstream corporate application for the conference room, displacing ISDN as the prime media. Videoconferencing to the desktop and mobile phone remained a novelty. The enterprise market continued to demand innovation in convergence applications; the service provider market did not. The whole world (except for a few skeptics) finally believes that voice over the Internet doesn’t suffer from quality-of-service degradation. For these predictions, we give ourselves an “A.”
In the second category, we came close; however, our crystal ball must have been a little fuzzy. We predicted 3G wireless subscribers would double worldwide, with most growth in the Asia-Pacific region. While we’re not sure the 3G subscriber base doubled, it did grow significantly. As we forecasted, voice and not data is the immediate market driver.
Luckily, our projected newsworthy denial-of-service attack on a carrier’s VoIP core never occurred – at least, not directly. However, this year’s worm and virus attacks against Microsoft operating systems did cause havoc on enterprise VoIP systems and across carrier IP networks.
We also predicted the worst of the telecom meltdown would be officially declared over. While we’re still waiting for the official announcement, we think the industry has definitely turned the corner. In this second category we’ll give ourselves a “B.”
In the third category, we’ll give ourselves a “C” for trying. We mistakenly forecasted that a major European service provider would convert to a VoIP core based on Session Initiation Protocol. Maybe the implementation documents are held up in the language translation department.
We expected that North American long-distance voice providers would publicly admit the amount of VoIP traffic in their core, but we must have missed the press release.
In the fourth and final category, we’ll award ourselves an “incomplete” grade. We’ve given up waiting for Broadway to create a stage-based musical on convergence. However, we still have high hopes for the film version.
Next time, our predictions for 2004.
