2007: The year in communications
Published: 21 Dec 2007 16:15 GMT
...save money on cables and packaging by not including their proprietary connectors, and users will finally be able to use one charger for all mobile devices — in theory, at least.
As for the mobile devices themselves, one word came to utterly dominate 2007: iPhone. Apple's unveiled handset was sleek, eminently usable, forward-looking and quickly imitated by a number of other manufacturers. It even got the business community excited, albeit with some trepidation from analysts who tried — largely in vain — to steer the corporate sector away from what was essentially a consumer device.
That said, business applications did not take long to appear, and the IP telephony vendor Avaya is now even offering a way to fold the iPhone into the corporate network.
With the furore surrounding the iPhone, it was unsurprising that Google's rumoured foray into the mobile market was dubbed the "Gphone" by many. But, when the reality arrived, it was not what people were expecting. It was not even a phone, as such, but a mobile platform — Android — with an impressive array of manufacturers and operators already lining up to show their support.
Android looks set to solidify a notoriously fragmented Linux handset market. Mobile Linux is already the dominant platform for consumer handsets, but not in any unified form that can be consistently targeted by developers. However, with Google's backing and a so-called "non-fragmentation agreement" between the members of its Open Handset Alliance, Linux could finally become a serious competitor to the high-end likes of Symbian, RIM and Windows Mobile.
2007 has been a mixed year for the internet telephony industry. On the one hand, VoIP has started to become a serious contender on the handset, particularly for those business travellers who want to maintain a single phone number across their desktop and mobile phones. Wrangling between the upstart Truphone and operators like Vodafone and T-Mobile demonstrated just how worried the mobile industry is about low-cost services piggybacking on their networks.
But, on the desktop, a flaw has appeared in the VoIP business plan, and the problem is the thorny issue of making money. Skype has been the poster child for this, having been bought at an apparently over-inflated price by eBay and then struggling to make a return on that investment. Some new ideas tried out by Skype — notably its video call tie-in with Logitech — spectacularly backfired, to the chagrin of its users.
Skype's business customers also had to contend with not only a serious outage but the withdrawal of thousands of London SkypeIn numbers. In some ways, Skype's 2007 has been symptomatic of wider issues in the Web 2.0 movement, but it has certainly served to warn business users of the dangers inherent in a service which comes with no service-level agreement.
Wi-Fi has also had an interesting year. The premature rollout of 802.11n, the fast, new iteration of Wi-Fi, has been marked by a flurry of mixed messages from the industry, amid compatibility and interference issues.
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One company, Aruba, even managed to warn businesses off 802.11n deployment only to try selling the technology to them just weeks later. Even the Wi-Fi Alliance industry body admitted that, when 802.11n is finally ratified as a standard in 2008 — or even, possibly, 2009 — there is no guarantee that the resulting products will fully interoperate with the "draft-n" products being sold today.
Wi-Fi was also accused of being hazardous to health in a flawed Panorama documentary on which the BBC subsequently had to backtrack and in a research paper which claimed it contributed to autism.
On the positive side, government-backed studies suggested that mobile phones and base stations were both safe to use. However, like so many current issues within the communications industry, this one looks set to roll on into 2008 and beyond.
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