An amazing thing the internet, I am old enough to remember when there was no internet, for a person of the internet era the prospect of not having access to Google eBay and Facebook is probably quite scary but it was once the case! When I started work there was no internet, there was dial up modem access, and if you wanted to buy something specialised it was a long drawn out process of either physically visiting a shop (if there was one accessible), or sending away for a catalogue, waiting a couple of weeks for it to arrive if it indeed did, and then trying to persuade the vendor to sell you whatever you wanted by sending them a cheque in the post. The equivalent today would be an eBay or Amazon search, or at worst a Google search and then ordering on line, maybe paying via PayPal, all done in 10 minutes!

So access to information content, and the ability to do commercial transactions pretty much instantaneously, has to be appreciated as one of the most incredible achievements of the internet era, and this has needed everyone in the industry to play their part, from access, through search, retail presentation, and of course secure payments.

There are other aspects to it that are perhaps less positive. For instance the development of the dark web providing untraceable access to anyone for anything, privacy is all very well but it can be used for evil purposes, maybe it’s not appropriate to blame the tools people use, rather the people themselves. In some parts of the world though this is probably one of the main reasons for brakes to be applied to internet development and adoption.

The impact of the internet has also changed several other industries massively, for instance it provides an easy method for small specialised retailers to access their market globally, but it has destroyed some aspects (social aspects) of the traditional physical shopping and the necessary physical retail outlets.

It provides new ways for people to communicate but then has created peculiar physically insular behaviours, for instance people spend hours physically on their own, logged on, or walk down the street totally divorced from their physical situation, fixated on their phones, and probably largely unaware of their fixation.

So it follows my theme of generally a good thing but open to miss-use, as is any powerful new(ish) tool in practice.

Looking more to the telecoms industry itself, the internet is again a double edged sword for many players. I can recall the mobile network operators launching data services at a time when everyone in the industry was looking for the ‘killer app’ that was going to take the world by storm, and justify the billions of investment needed in the access network. So, it is more than a little ironic that while they were looking so hard, they missed the fact that ‘looking’ is itself the killer app, i.e. ‘search’ is probably the most popular and enduring service that there will ever be, everything else seems to have its moment and fade, but not ‘search’, that remains a pretty generic high utility requirement.

That irony aside, the internet has stimulated a massive commoditisation in the telecoms sector, where the access be it fixed or mobile is far less valued and certainly far less valuable than it used to be. Similarly, the traditional killer services of voice and messaging (in the form of SMS) have also been devalued, in the case of voice because not only are there alternative OTT voice services, but also there are alternative methods to communicate, principally messaging (The extroverts reading this will not agree, but the introverts will understand what I am on about).

Looking to the real value in the sector, you frequently hear that ‘content is king’ personally I think that is rubbish despite what the money markets might tell you, (money markets: guys who managed to create a completely unnecessary internet triggered crash if you recall, believing their own self-induced hype and having misunderstood the nature of the internet in its early years) the reality is, access is useless without some form of content be it self-generated or commercially generated, and vice versa, content with no access method to deliver it is equally useless. My belief is that things will over the long term normalise to reflect their genuine value, and that will eventually reflect the cost in some way.

But when you put it all together the kings of old of telecoms, the BTs and Vodafones have done OK despite their whining, they may have lost a lot of their traditional voice and messaging revenues, but they have gained a customer base with an insatiable and long term desire for their prime service, data access, and today that is driving pretty much all of their revenue. That desire for data access also looks to be there for the very long term, so as they build their business plans going forward they may well be being commoditised, but they have a future that is assured, not such a bad position in such an uncertain world. The painful pill will be to make the books balance with the investment needed to keep access infrastructure sufficiently scaled, and here, I believe governments will need to take a hand with regulation, to prevent for instance the nonsense we have heard recently from BT about copper being sufficient until 2030 becoming a reality.

The outlook for the internet giants is perhaps a little less secure, whilst it appears that there will always be internet giants, they do seem to come and go all be it on a long cycle, they become untrendy and whilst the core services they provide may well continue they often do so under a different guise.

So, looking into a crystal ball what for the next 25 years, well I would predict:

• The appetite for data consumption continues, driving ever more need for both ubiquitous mobile and fixed high speed internet access and all at massive volumes,
• Access will become more commoditised, allowing customers to move between providers very dynamically almost on a session basis, this will trigger the emergence of a tier of access aggregators and an access spot market,
• The reliance of society and commerce worldwide on the internet continues to increase, such that it becomes a totally fundamental piece of infrastructure, and any society or sect that does not embrace the internet becomes unable to compete in any real sense,
• Language barriers disappear as the use of simultaneous translation services becomes totally normal, totally expected and totally accepted, a babel fish albeit technologically based,
• Security continues to be a concern and there continue to be high profile hacks as the war of attrition plays out, no magic solution will be found,
• New and innovative services continue to develop, and the tendency of company’s having their 15 minutes of fame and then fading into the background continues meaning many of the big names of today will be dim and distant memories,
• The next truly major breakthrough in internet technology (as opposed to incremental improvement in access and services) will be in the human interface,
• The internet will be acknowledged as a addictive drug and treatment for it formally developed,
• AI’s will continue to develop and their main influence will be in making the internet a far more personal and efficient experience,
• Anyone not using the internet to its full extent will be unable to succeed in nearly all professions but particularly commerce.

Is that a recipe for a good world, well I could think of a lot worse outcomes.