Infrastructure and technology: Review of the year

Computing's reviews editor, Dave Bailey, gives his highlights of 2009

Google Wave - launched in may

With Barack Obama installed in the White House, the global economy melting, and the banks reeling after near collapse in 3Q 2008, 2009 got underway.

January - Interim 'Digital Britain' report published

In mid January, south-coast seaside resort Bournemouth woke up to find something more pleasant than usual in its sewers – 100Mbit/s optical fibre connections, courtesy of network provider Fibrecity.

The next city up for a sewer Fibrecity is Dundee, although people thinking of going with the firm's website tagline of 'Touch Tomorrow Today', may want to think twice before complying.

At the end of January, Lord Carter of Barnes’ Interim Digital Britain report landed on our desks. The report was intended to be the blueprint that would put UK plc at the top of the digital pile.

Carter invited people to comment on the document – and comment they did, especially on the universal service commitment to provide all UK citizens with a broadband connection. And the download speed of those connections? The report was pretty modest in its aspirations, it said: "Subject to further study of the costs and benefits, we will set out our plans for the level of service which we believe should be universal. We anticipate this consideration will include options up to 2Mbit/s."

2Mbit/s?

Criticism surrounding the paucity of ambition came from all quarters, but one thing not defined in the report was the upload speed of connections. That parameter could be critical to the UK becoming a 'digital leader'. The final report was due in the summer - with everyone hoping for a network upgrade.

February - Could a new spectrum auction fool mobile operators again?

So February arrived, and with it UK comms regulator Ofcom held yet another consultation on 'liberalising' the radio spectrum, aimed at addressing mobile-operator service needs. However, having been fleeced at the start of the decade to the tune of £22.5bn by the then chancellor Gordon Brown, the mobile operators were understandably wary about such 'liberalisation'.

Particularly if it meant another Labour chancellor taking more cash. The Who's classic 60's record: "Won't get fooled again” springs to mind.

March - Ofcom gives green light to BT for next gen rollout

In March Ofcom released another document: "Delivering super-fast broadband in the UK: Promoting investment and competition", this time it was concerned with fixed line broadband services. The 90-page document looked at how it would regulate the costs of providing next generation access to the internet.

The document said: "we will ensure that any regulatory pricing allows investors to earn a rate of return that genuinely reflects the cost of deployment and the associated level of risk."

Cynics argued that the handshake between BT and Ofcom had already taken place behind closed doors, and that the incumbent was about to “stiff” the country again with the roll out of optical fibre connections.

April - Flexible workers of the UK unite

In April new flexible working legislation arrived, giving an extra 4.5m UK employees, parents with children under 16, the right to request to work flexibly. Would bosses be terrified by thoughts of remote workers sat at home watching daytime TV with their legs stretched out over a couple of crates of Timothy Taylor's Landlord bitter? (Describing your own homeworking habits there maybe? -Ed)

Possibly, but with the harsh wind of a recession blowing, homeworkers were more likely to be hell-bent on proving how productive they could be.

Meanwhile at Computing, a trickle – soon to be a deluge - of ISP and unified communications vendor press releases started arriving, each touting the efficacy of their remote working solutions, designed to address the flood of 'flexible workers'.

May - Google Wave's hello

In May, Google trumped Microsoft's upgraded search engine release – Bing – with an ambitious collaborative application called Google Wave. Although currently only available to selected users, Wave complements Google's drive to move applications to the end of the network cable, and not have them run locally on desktop PCs.

June - 50p Broadband Tax announced

June busted out all over with rumours that 'Digital Britain' author Lord Carter would resign after his final report hit Gordon Brown's desk. That report, all 238 pages of it, did hit the streets later in the month, with the universal service commitment upgraded from 'up to 2Mbit/s' to 'a minimum of 2Mbit/s'. Unsurprisingly there were no street parties held.

As for next generation network access, Lord Carter proposed a 50p per month broadband tax for rolling out such network connections to the 'final third' of the population who don’t have access to next generation network infrastructure.

July - Conservatives say 'Death to Ofcom'

In July BT announced trials of fibre-to-the-cabinet optical connections, in Muswell Hill in London and in Whitchurch near Cardiff.

News also surfaced that should the Conservatives win next year's general election, Ofcom would be disembowelled, and the broadband tax scrapped.

It was a busy month for Microsoft, which announced its entry into 'Cloud Computing' by saying it would launch Azure Cloud Services in November. The software giant also announced the delivery timeline and feature set of Office 2010 at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in New Orleans.

In addition, it released the next version of its desktop operating system, Windows 7, bidding 'goodnight and thank you' to its hated predecessor Vista.

August - Carter passes the poisoned chalice

Step forward new Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, who took the posioned chalice from Lord Carter.

September - Bigger Oranges

France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom surprised the rest of the UK's mobile operators by announcing a 'merger'. This would give the new entity 37 per cent of the UK market with 28.4 million customers, revenues approaching £8bn, and over 50 per cent of the radio spectrum.

Meanwhile UK scientists at the University of Bristol claimed their first ever calculation on optical quantum chip. Easy factorisation of large prime numbers using quantum compute systems could render current encryption techniques used over the Internet useless. However, the boffins at Bristol eased fears by saying that fully functional systems wouldn't be around for 30-50 years.

Microsoft announced its Office Web Applications push with the availability of a technical preview. Computing 'kicked the tyres', but it was a very early preview, and not likely to be 'feature complete' until well into 2010.

October - Ballmer deafens UK customers at Windows 7 launch

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer came to London for the official launch of Windows 7 in the UK. After deafening an audience of customers with his booming voice, one of them piped up with: "I would appreciate your thoughts on how to simplify the applications licensing process."

Ballmer's reply:

"If there are specific things that you people consider to be complicated, or that have meant you incur unnecessary costs, I encourage you to email me. "

Meanwhile the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) did something useful by approving a one-size-fits-all charger for mobile phones.

November - Digging the dirt

The quote of the year was uttered in November, at a Westminster eForum discussing the, Future of Broadband in the UK. Here's Virgin Media executive director of broadband Jon James speaking about the company's first street digging-up exercise for several years: "The economics of new build remain challenging - the shovel has not advanced as a technology since the early cable companies went bankrupt digging up the streets of the UK."

At Microsoft's Tech. Ed event in Berlin, where celebrations for the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall were being conducted, Microsoft announced the general availability of Exchange Server 2010. In this new version, firms were encouraged to attach SATA storage to Exchange servers to reduce costs, and allow the user's mailboxes to be greatly increased. So after years of expert opinion saying that direct attached storage to servers was a no-no, we were told that it was now OK to do this.

December - ISPs to subsidise BT's pension fund?

Ofcom gave us another consultation. This time one guaranteed to have BT's competitors foaming at the mouth. It holds out the possibility, tiny though it could be, that BT would be allowed to bump up charges for phone lines and broadband connections to reduce its pension fund deficit.

Ofcom expects to publish a further consultation on BT's pension costs in spring 2010 with a statement to follow later in the year.

The government's chief medical officer for England Sir Liam Donaldson, updated the public about deaths from swine flu. For every 100,000 cases, 26 people died, and only one per cent of the UK population had contracted the virus. So that's a case-fatality ratio (CFR) of 0.026 per cent.

H1N1 is, on the scale flu pandemics are measured by - the Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) - small beer. The PSI is used in the US to delineate the severity of any pandemic, and currently Swine Flu H1N1 strain is classed as one. PSI one flu strains have a case-fatality ratio of less than one per cent.

Anybody who thinks this was quite a bad epidemic, needs only to be pointed towards Mike Davis's : "The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. "
Avian Flu is the H5N1 strain, which hasn't yet crossed over to humans, has a PSI of five.

How much remote working kit could a H5N1 epidemic sell for ISPs and unified comms vendors? Answers on a postcard.

Meanwhile, snow is falling in various parts of the UK, so at Computing we're standing by to delete yet more emails from UC vendors about how their wares could have helped thousands of unprepared businesses cope with snow chaos.

2010

2009 was the Chinese year of the Ox. 2010 will be the year of the Tiger, although probably not on the golf course. VAT is going back up to 17.5 per cent in January, and before the end of June there will be a general election in the UK.

Happy New Year.