Cisco and The Monitor Group’s Global Business Network has released, “The Evolving Internet,” a year-long research project carried out by an interdisciplinary team that “examines the driving forces and uncertainties that will…shape the path of the Internet [and the $3 trillion market it enables]” out to the year 2025.
The research, basing four evolutionary future scenarios on five premises, is intended as a business and policy strategy development roadmap to “help decision makers in both technology companies and government understand, anticipate, and manage key changes, risks, and opportunities so that the Internet’s potential to create economic and social value can be realized globally,” according to a Cisco news release. A range of “critical factors,” such as net neutrality policies, infrastructure investments, consumer response to new pricing models, and technology adoption, are examined with an eye towards elaborating how they “might play out.”
“We can’t predict the future, but we do know that the Internet-related choices being made in 2010 will have long-term consequences—intended and unintended. We hope these scenarios will foster a deeper strategic conversation in and across the technology and policy communities about the impact of today’s decisions tomorrow,”
It’s clear to the researchers that the next 2 billion Internet users will be very different than the two billion estimated Internet users globally today, a conclusion with broad ramifications throughout the Internet’s technological structure and economic/financial value chain.
“The next 2 or 3 billion Internet users will be mostly in emerging markets and very different from the first 2 billion; global business models and national policies will fail if they are based on old expectations of behavior, preferences, and success,” noted Enrique Rueda-Sabater, the report’s co-author and Cisco’s director of strategy and economics for emerging markets.
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Categories: Broadband
