Broadband Technologies. There were predictions that by 2020 that we’d see upgrades to G.Fast in rural copper networks and to next-generation PON equipment for fiber deployments. Neither of these happened for various reasons. US telcos have never accepted G.Fast, although there is widespread adoption in Europe where copper networks are delivering 300 Mbps speeds to customers. The big telcos in the US are making no investments in rural copper unless the FCC fully funds it. Many smaller telcos have taken advantage of changes in the Universal Service Fund to upgrade from copper to fiber rather than upgrade DSL. Next-generation PON electronics are still waiting for one big ISP to buy enough gear to lower prices.
Widespread 5G. It’s not hard to understand why this would have been believed in 2014 since the big carriers were already in hype mode even then. One prediction was that as many as 60% of cellphones would be 5G by 2020. There were several predictions that 5G was going to enable autonomous vehicles and that building fiber along highways would be routine by 2020. There was a prediction that we’d see small cells everywhere, with deployments every 3,000 feet.
The timing of 5G is far behind those predictions. I see where Cisco recently estimated that only 3% of cellphones worldwide would be 5G enabled by 2022. Most experts today believe that the cellular networks will still predominantly rely on 4G LTE even a decade from today. The idea of building a cellular network for autonomous vehicles died – it was always hard to imagine the revenue stream that would have supported that network. We may still get to a dense small cell network someday, but calling for a small cell every 3,000 feet still sounds incredibly aggressive even decades from now.
IoT and LPWAN. There was a prediction that by 2020 that we’d have deployed low bandwidth networks using 900 MHz spectrum that would connect to huge numbers of outdoor IoT sensors. The prediction was that there is a huge revenue opportunity to charge $1 monthly for each sensor. There are still those calling for these networks today, but it’s still not getting any widespread traction.
Widespread Adoption of Augmented and Virtual Reality. Those technologies were on everybody’s future list in 2014. Oculus Rift was the leader in developing virtual reality and Magic Leap had raised several rounds of funding to develop augmented reality. There is now a sizable gaming deployment of virtual reality, but virtual reality has not yet touched the average person or moved beyond gaming. Magic Leap finally started selling a developer headset at the end of last year.
We Should Be Overrun by Now with Robots and Drones. In 2014 there was a prediction of robots everywhere by 2020. New factories are manned today by robots, but robots are still news when they are used in a public-facing function. A few hotels are trying out a robot concierge. There are a few automated fast food restaurants. There are a few hospitals with robots that transport meals and medicines. Robots deliver take-out food in a few city centers and university towns.
Drones are quietly being used for functions like mapping and inspecting storm damage. Flying small drones is now a popular hobby. Amazon keeps experimenting with drone delivery of packages but it’s still in the trial stage. Commercial use of drones is still in its infancy.
Use of Data. My favorite prediction was that by 2020 we’d have software systems that can deliver data at the right place, at the right time, to the right person, on the right device. This harkens back to the old AT&T promise that someday we’d be able to watch any movie we wanted, the minute we wanted. To some degree that old promise came to pass, although it was implemented by somebody other than AT&T.
Some businesses are meeting parts of this prediction today. These are custom platforms that send trouble tickets to technicians, notify employees to connect a new customer, automate ordering of inventory, etc. However, nothing close to that promise has yet made it into our everyday lives. In fact, except for Candy Crush most of us probably still have the same apps on our smartphones we used in 2014. Many of us are still waiting for the digital assistant we were first promised a decade ago.
Got Some Things Right. It’s easy to pick on predictions that never came to pass and I’ve made plenty of those myself. There was some great prediction in 2014. One presenter said we’d continue to see the explosive growth of residential data usage, that would continue to grow at 24% per year – that’s still a dead-on prediction. There was a prediction that businesses would migrate employees to mobile devices and it is routine today to see employees in all sorts of businesses operating from a tablet. There was a prediction of explosive growth of machine-to-machine data traffic, and today this one of the areas fastest traffic growth.