Welcome to the Digital Future – Again
The information age might have encountered a partial technical glitch during the telecoms bubble bust, but following the reboot of the digital economy, it is finally living up to its promise of delivering unprecedented economic growth, unparalleled social change and yes, rapid growth in the demand for bandwidth. There is plenty of excitement in the industry for not only organic growth of demand, but new applications, new business models, new opportunities. More importantly, telecommunications has evolved, becoming an industry that reaches out across multiple disciplines, across technologies and cultures. This will be one of the central themes at this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council’s “Beyond Telecom” conference, to be held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, in Honolulu, Hawaii on 14-17 January 2007.
By Bill Barney
Of course, the road to this second coming of the digital future was not without glitches. Despite unprecedented growth rates in computer and Internet penetration, the market, perhaps facilitated by the increasing free flow of information, simply couldn’t wait for reality to run its due course.
Investors committed billions of dollars in the construction of fiber optic cable systems in the sea, over ground and into buildings and homes in the hope of capturing the pending explosion of Internet users reaching out for bandwidth. At the same time, mobile operators saw the immense potential of delivering Internet services to mobile phones over wireless networks and spent billions of dollars to acquire spectrum licenses for 3G services. The result was the birth of the telecoms bubble, which came to a grinding halt as both fixed and mobile carriers crumbled under a mountain of debt and seeing only a fraction of the anticipated growth of market projections. This was followed by major bankruptcy filings, corporate retrenchments and the collapse of confidence for all things technological. The early 90s saw the systematic digitization of information and transmissions technologies, presenting the world with a picture of the future where everything is digitized and connected. That future doesn’t happen overnight, as the market has learned, but the vision of the future remains, and perhaps is more valid today. 24