It means connectivity for anyone, anywhere, any time. Only the Internet comes close to this vision.
We all know about dialtone (especially my daughter), and many of us are familiar with the concept of "data dialtone". Simply put, it means connectivity for anyone, anywhere, any time. Only the Internet comes close to this vision, and surely it is set to become the dialtone of the future - in fact, apart from data and multimedia, a lot of plain old voice traffic will be carried over the Internet and other IP networks.
I thought it fitting to begin this new column with the dialtone observation, because so much talk centres around the cool new medium that it begs the question - for how long? How soon before the question of electronic commerce becomes as dumb as asking "do you conduct telephone commerce?" or "do you conduct fax commerce?" The commerce dialtone will have arrived.
To answer this question, yes. OK, as that`s not a valid answer, here goes. From an Internet connectivity point of view, about three years from now most grandparents will be surfing and using e-mail. Nearly half of American households will be online. South Africa currently has a teledensity of only 10%, which means that only about four million people have personal access to a phone. We should reach an "Interneteledensity" (new word, my own invention) of about 5% by 2003, ie two million active users. But for office workers and sophisticated consumers, the connectivity question should be about as passe as the rand/dollar slide by that time.
From an e-commerce point of view, the topic should stick around a lot longer. In fact, most areas of economic activity will be between 1% and 2% penetrated by e-commerce by 2002. Leaves a lot of room for expansion, doesn`t it? Provided we don`t all get tired of online shopping and head for the mall for some serious REAL retail therapy. Just think - a whole new breed of ponytailed individuals (I`m just jealous as they still have their hair) setting a new trend: "offline shopping"!
So what direction should this column take? Actually we would like you, the reader, to tell us. ITWeb will host an "Ask the Analysts" button, and we will choose the most interesting questions (or the most persistent buggers), to provide some light or sometimes even serious comment in this column. We will focus on the whole network-centric world, the world of digital media convergence!
Andre will highlight the telecommunications perspective, and I (Brian) the crossover world of e-bizznis and InternITelecommology. On other topics we may take a piquant view or defer questions to the rest of the bunch of soothsayers who sometimes call themselves analysts - Mark, Denis, Eileen, Stephen, Neville, Diedre, Barry, Debbie, Anton, Althea, Brenda, Nicola, Felicity, Nozicelo, Loretta, Steve, Megan, Caryn, Tracy, Jaco, Kgotso and Tebogo.
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