Australia's future technology headlines … for 2019! The technology industry loves to claim that the leaders of its Australian outposts are sages worthy of delivering prognostications from on high, rather than glorified territory managers with a continent to cover. So at this time of year they send El Reg predictions for what will happen on the local tech scene during the next …
Brown-outs become common. Government threatens to nationalise the power industry to which the power companies respond "your welcome to it!".... private industry pulls out/reduces investing in the poor power infrastructure. Individuals seek to mitigate the power issue by installing private solar farms but get taxed to the hilt by the government looking for money to try and build a national electrical network (NEN?)
Electric car "service stations" shut due to limited power supply.
NBN equipment blanket failure due to "unusually" hot summers cooking the curbside equipment results in a special tax to help sustain NBN.
Sydney's housing market plummets after government restrictions on housing investment come into force - complaints by China force government u-turn.
The government determines that delivering the NEN over copper will be too expensive and proposes a fibre based NEN. This is installed beyond the point of no return and the government discovers it can't provide the power consumers were expecting over the fibre NEN. They then proceed to blame the generators for not purchasing enough PVC's (Powered Virtual Circuits.) It is then determined that 4% of Australians will have their NEN power provided by Fixed Wireless. Yet again power is failed to be delivered in levels expected by consumers and Generators are forced to offer compensation for promising power levels beyond what the NEN can deliver.
Albanese, the man who gave us mandatory full body scanners at Australia's international airports. No opt out clauses, no limits on future technologies and no requirements that any of it be proven effective or safe. With the support of the Abbott government this was passed in the lower house at which point Labor and the LNP stood and applauded each other - suggesting there was considerable generosity at play. Our robust political democracy in action.
While a Labor win is likely, the major parties are struggling with record low primary votes (Barnaby excluded). With a series of S.44 by elections leading up to the 2019 poll it is likely that both parties will struggle to finance their national campaigns. Almost all parties will be relying on Australia's dumb as a box of rocks electorates to keep voting against their own interests.
My prediction for 2019 is an Internet startup - say Pubar (pronounced Pooh-Bah) - that will facilitate the delivery of bribes (or donations as they are called) between the common citizen and their party representatives so that ordinary people can enjoy the thrill of democracy. Need a politician for 20 minutes to attend your kids birthday party - Pubar it. Demand pricing would of course apply around popular events. The political parties would discover a new fund raising mechanism and we could throw away any pretense that the generous salaries enjoyed by politicians in any way contributes to their loyalties and obligations to the tax payer.
The development we didn't predict. The reputation of Silicon Valley -- and IT startups in general -- was trashed by their insularity, their poor behaviour towards women, their dismissive attitude towards social responsibility in general, and towards paying taxes in particular.
How my prediction went. Poorly, WPIT didn't make the mainstream press as a potential sinkhole of taxpayer funds and a risk to the nation's economy which needs to be managed beyond the usual levels of IT project executive oversight.
2018 prediction: optical networking prices will continue to plummet, and many corporate networks will insert a WDM fabric under their ethernet transmission. The NBN's powered boxes by the side of the road will look archaic within half a decade. A newer design would use small, cheap, unpowered in-pit WDM muxes. Yes that needs fibre-to-the-premises, but fibre is now cheaper than copper for all but trivial cables.
Related: networking gear from China will become so cheap that bespoke-made items will make sense for large networks.
The NBN's powered boxes by the side of the road look archaic now but we will stick with them because we are Stralians' and that is what we do! Soothed over by talk of off-budget, user pays, its all Labor's fault, terrorists hate us for our infrastructure, no one needs more than 640K, etc. Mobile broadband will be enough for the older low bandwidth (email and web) customers if the telco's get their pricing and marketing right. That will blow a big hole in the NBN both for finance and contention meaning no money for upgrades and no justifiable demand. NBN may even need to offer a CVC aggregation product across many POI's to keep things affordable (closer to the original plan).
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