Australia is not a bad litmus test for trends of the future, as long as one takes one's own national specifics into account:
About 2 million people are considering ditching their fixed-line home phones, as Australians move closer to becoming one of the world's first wireless economies. For the first time this year, the communications giant Telstra has had more mobile phone subscribers than fixed-line subscribers. Mobile phones now outnumber fixed lines by more than two-to-one.
There are 105 mobiles for every 100 people, making Australia one of the most saturated markets in the world behind South Korea, with 114 mobile phones for every 100 people.
Although research has shown the decline of fixed lines has been relatively slow, declining by 1.7 per cent a year since 2004, research by the Australian Communications and Media Authority shows as many as one in five consumers have considered dropping their fixed line subscriptions to save money.
In Britain, the giant BT has just about got the landline game sewn up and their advantage is pressed in that a BT line is one of those tick boxes which helps you to credit and really groovy things like that, which converts you from a non-person to a person. A DVLA full licence is another. However, BT is so bureaucratically hopeless that many react agaisnt it, go for Virgin or whatever and pay the price later for things which don't dovetail quite as easily as before.
And let's face it - mobiles are expensive to run, the hidden charges outweighing the benefits. So what Australians seem to want is the flexibility and convenience, at a small cost. The good life, in other words. On top of that is the way mobiles are now so much more - cameras, organizers and so on and so on.
I phone springs to mind.
With Ms Fox pushing hard for everyone to be connected to the net, with Obama intimating he can take over the net as and when he wants and with people connected in phonespace and cyberspace through the ubiquitous Facebook, command and control is looking shipshape and full steam ahead.
Fixed-mobile substitution, as it's known, is a long-observed phenomenon. The figures for the ratio of mobile-phone connections to population in South Korea and Australia you cite appear well out of date to me: some European countries are now up in the 130's and 140's, and the UK's percentage is also higher than the Australian figure you give. In many Central European states, the number of mobile-phone connections far outstrips that of fixed lines, as mobile phones caught on before the fixed infrastructure had been adequately modernised in the wake of the Communist era.
ReplyDeleteThe buzz word now is 'convergence', which includes the coming together of mobile and fixed technologies but also that of services (e.g. TV, internet and phone), and that of voice and data. The latter trend is probably the most significant, as voice (i.e. the phone) is rapidly being transformed into just another type of data, as it is being carried over IP (Internet Protocol). This has huge implications for privacy and security, as you rightly state, because once voice is digitised, it is easier to intercept, store and retrieve.
Clearly, we can have little confidence that the UK government has any coherent strategy to protect British citizens from the intrusive and harmful potential of these technologies alongside their benefits. If anything, one just suspects the government of wanting to manipulate them to spy on ordinary people all the more.
Thanks for that. I'm wondering how all this ties in with Total Information Awareness and the nastiness behind that.
ReplyDelete