Certainly no calendar flip would be complete without a laundry list of predictions for the new year. FierceWireless has put together a compelling predictions for the wireless industry. To summarize:

• Net neutrality will pass, but with exceptions for wireless
• Palm will be purchased by another handset vendor
• Pricing, coverage issues will hinder cable companies’ wireless offerings
• Sprint Nextel’s 4G leadership will help revive the carrier
• Huawei will get one LTE deal in North America
• At least one wireless carrier will experiment with usage-based data pricing
• Motorola will show some signs of recovery thanks to Android (last year, FierceWireless predicted “Motorola’s handset division will cease to be“)
• Computer makers’ attempts at Android smartphones will flounder

Read the full FierceWireless report here.

 

Meanwhile, Juniper Research has drawn up a list of predictions for the coming year, all neatly wrapped up as the top ten predictions for the mobile and wireless industry for 2010. Summarized as follows:

 

• Mobile Data Traffic Explosion to strain 3G Networks, spur data pricing overhaul
• Mobile Ecosystem starts to go green
• Mobile Heads for the Cloud
• New Category of Merging Smartphone Functionality and Netbooks to Emerge
• Apps Stores All Round
• Mobile Social Networking to Integrate with other Applications including M-Commerce
• NFC phones appear in the shops
• At least 10 LTE networks to be launched into service
• Smartphones to Get Augmented Reality Makeover
•  Christmas Kindle sales expected to herald the rise of the connected embedded consumer devices

The first prediction is one I’m hearing a lot about from our infrastructure clients. As Juniper says, although 3G is less than ten years old, 2010 could be the year when 3G networks begin to fall over under the burden of mobile data, due largely to some 33.8m iPhones that have been sold since launch.

 

Then there’s Dean Bubley‘s predictions from his Disruptive Wireless blog. Dean lists “heroes, zeroes, and no-surprises” as follows:

 

Heros

• HSPA+
• Apple iPhone
• Android
• Augmented reality
• Facebook
• Consumer femtocells
• Huawei
• “Comes with data”
• Connection-sharing
• Operator-on-operator applications

Zeros

• Mobile IMS and RCS
• LTE
• Virtual conferences
• NFC
• Twitter
• Enterprise femtocells
• Embedded 3G netbooks
• Smartphone profit margins
• Operator AppStores
• Aggregated social networks
• The terms “dumb pipe” and “over the top”

No surprises

• WiMAX
• Open network APIs
• WiFi
• Nokia
• BlackBerry
• Consolidation
• Mobile TV (“Was dead, is dead, will stay dead.”)
• Data roaming prices

And finally, WirelessWeek compiled its list by soliciting input from “industry leaders” on the following topics for 2010:

• Prepaid & data
• Net neutrality & mobile web
• Emphasis on competition, emerging devices
• Race to converged connectivity
• Wireless in the enterprise
• Content & apps purchasing on rise
• Video optimization as prevalent as web optimization
• Synthesis for M2M services
• Mobile money expansion
• Smartphones for more people
• M2M is major growth area
• Large brands recognize value of mobile applications
• Mobile backhaul providers embrace COE to meet needs

Lots of predictions in a volatile industry. I came away from the holidays with one prevailing observation – as we turn the decade clock to 2010, one thing is far different than ten years ago. My extended family had a lovely time together as always, but everyone sure spent a lot of time on their various mobile devices. At one point, I looked around the table at more than a dozen siblings, children, neices & nephews and saw why the room was so quiet – everyone had a mobile device in their hands.

My prediction: This mobile thing is going to be big.

Yes, well I don’t know about changing everything, but a few days ago, Glenn Fleishman wrote about 3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile augmented reality as being key breakthrough technologies emerging over the next few years. While there are certainly many such lists to be made, I think Glenn’s done a nice job detailing this particular set of five technologies for us.

He rightly dubs USB as one of the “least-sexy technologies” built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speeding it up by an order of magnitude is a game changer. And in fact, USB 3.0 (a.k.a. SuperSpeed) should deliver more than 3.2 gbps of actual throughput. The results will introduce major changes in device connectivity, computer backup (coupled with coming advances in flash drives), and video (replacing HDMI?).

By 2012, two new WiFi protocols–802.11ac and 802.11ad–are expected to handle over-the-air data transmission at 1 gbps or faster. Glenn does a nice job of pointing out that the high speed transfers will work well “moving data across short distances between devices in the same room.” He quotes Allen Huotari, the technical leader at Cisco as saying “home networks won’t result from “any one single technology in the home, but rather a pairing of technologies or a trio of technologies–wired and/or wireless–for the backbone and the wireless on the edges.” With one foot firmly in the G.hn camp, Rainier concurs.

Then we come to 3D TV. Could the makers of the old red and blue cardboard eyeglasses ever have envisioned the coming active-shutter approach to 3D simulations? What Hollywood has historically called “depth enhanced movies” are now moving more toward the promise of real 3DTV, an immersive, true-to-life experience that’s nothing like anything we’ve seen before.

Augmented Reality?

My favorite part of Glenn’s article is his discussion of “augmented reality.” First of all, the phrase itself, with or without quotation marks, pulls us immediately into the philosophical domain. I personally think that until we can artificially stimulate our cranial neurons to have choreographed experiences, reality is still reality.

Technologies like heads-up displays, etc. are terrific tools for enhancing safety, efficiency, etc., but they are still tools (is a compass – once an exceedingly innovative high-tech device, “augmented reality?”)

Glenn’s final breakthrough, HTML5, sounds a little dull until you consider it might may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins, and will let designers create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device. Yeah, actually, that would be kind of awesome.

Read Glenn’s article in its entirety here.

Arbor Networks (along with the University of Michigan and Merit Network) have put together the “Internet Observatory Report” which they say is the largest study of global Internet traffic ever. The report analyzes two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers. 

While the report includes discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; it is the concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends that provides the most interesting food for thought.

Whereas five years ago, Internet traffic was distributed fairly evenly across tens of thousands of web sites and servers around the world, most content has now clustered around a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.

Out of the 40,000 routed end sites, 30 large companies (what Arbor calls “hyper giants”) like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube now generate and consume 30% of all Internet traffic.

In addition, while Internet applications historically communicated across numerous application-specific protocols and communication stacks, just a few web and video protocols now dominate (including video over web and Adobe Flash). Arbor says other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years (this drop seems to be what most people are focusing on, but I personally don’t find it that surprising).

The report’s final key finding is that macroeconomic forces have “radically transformed” the global Internet ecosystem. A wave of innovation is ongoing, says Arbor, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs.

I can’t help but agree strongly that these changes in particular have significant and ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research.