As you may have noticed, Telecom Asia turns 20 this month. And it's hard to look back at the premiere issue of the magazine without marveling at what a different place the telecoms industry was back then.
To give you an idea, when I joined TA in 1996, editorial policy dictated that for the most part, we did not cover the internet industry, which was considered outside of the telecoms sector. We covered data related technologies like ISDN, B-ISDN, ATM and xDSL, but we didn't write about routers, Netscape or anything related to the web.
Clearly we've come a long way since then. The internet has drastically reshaped the business operations of retail, media and content companies ... and, yes the telecoms sector, too. Which sounds obvious in retrospect, of course, but remember that in the mid-90s, not everyone saw the internet as a major force of change beyond its academic origins.
In 1996, astronomer Clifford Stoll - more widely known for helping to track and catch a hacker back when such things were uncommon - wrote a book called Silicon Snake Oil, in which he argued that the internet was way overhyped and that, at the end of the day, who really wants to do their shopping or buy a newspaper online?
To be fair, technically Stoll was right at least in terms of the hype and timing, as the dotcom bust illustrated all too clearly. But to really appreciate the scope of how big a force the internet industry has become in the traditional telecoms space, consider the recent revelation from network security/monitoring company Arbor Networks, which recently determined that Google alone accounted for anywhere from 6% to 10% of global internet traffic by June 2009, and is the third biggest and fastest growing ISP on the planet, if you go by interdomain traffic volumes.
Who would have seen that coming 20 years ago?
Which is the point, really. The telecoms landscape of 2010 looks almost nothing like it did in 1990 in terms of the competitive and regulatory environments as well as the core technologies and architectures that telcos are migrating toward. Even the business model is changing (albeit grudgingly) as telcos become service-driven and customer-focused in ways they've never been before.
The next twenty
And if you think the last 20 years were a wild ride, the next two decades will bring even more changes and disruptions to telecoms as we know it, thanks in no small part to the accelerated pace of technological change and the growing power of consumers and enterprises to harness technology and apps and shape them in ways service providers can't anticipate - and do it faster.
At the same time, there are forces that can throw off innovation timetables, from economic crises and political upheavals to policy initiatives designed to force ISPs to police the web in the name of censorship or copyright protection. I wouldn't go so far as to say telecoms service growth hinges on reasonable DRM policies, but there's ample evidence that innovation doesn't flourish in restrictive environments - and there's additional evidence that certain regulators are determined to restrict them anyway.
All of which is why it's difficult to imagine what telecoms will look like when Telecom Asia reaches its 40th birthday.
The only safe bet at this stage is that you won't be reading that anniversary issue on dead trees unless you order it via a cloud-based print-on-demand service. Otherwise, you'll read it on your glasses/contact lens display and flip through the articles and videos with voice or thought commands like normal people. It's also likely that your glasses/lenses (which only you can use thanks to the retina-scan biometrics) will be connected to your wearable motion-charged body-area network that uses ambient LED lighting for a backhaul link to your home femtocell.
Provided there's a bankable business model, I mean. To steal/rewrite a line from author William Gibson: the future is here, it's just not billable yet.
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