C&W: The end of the office as we know it

 

Over the next ten years the concept of an office will become increasingly irrelevant. The devices carried by an individual will all be dual purpose – meaning that they will serve for both consumer and corporate purposes as required. Devices such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry smartphones have already started this trend, but we will see this grow exponentially over the decade. Laptops, for instance, will become much lighter as hard-drives are replaced by chips which can route to the corporate or consumer Cloud as desired by the user.  

 

Workers already have the ability to work from virtually any location. This ability will be extended over the decade and the performance of remote networking will increase as 4G mobile networks become commonplace, allowing employees to access high-speed broadband wirelessly and anywhere. Fixed Mobile Convergence will reach tipping point and we will see the end of the desk phone within the first five years of the decade, allowing them to be contacted via one number, regardless of location. 

 

This is not to say that the office will disappear altogether. The face-to-face contact that an office provides encourages collaboration and is essential for building a cohesive company culture. What will happen is that greater flexibility and choice will enter the workplace and the lines between home and office will become further blurred, depending on individual preference and business requirements. 

 

The way that businesses consume broadband within the office (defined as the network of employees, wherever they may be) will also change dramatically. In developed regions, broadband will become a commodity and will plummet in price. Businesses will be able to buy huge amounts of capacity and bandwidth, allowing them to support feature rich applications such as video, which will become a key application for the next ten years. Developing markets will see broadband offered on an on-demand basis. This will allow them to request additional broadband resource for peak times; ensuring business operations are at their most effective when they are most needed. This flex-up and flex-down approach will provide businesses with a uniquely tailored broadband environment. 

 

 

The result of this change is that relationships between businesses and telecoms operators will become more important. With a wider variety of communications services layered across the network and offered over the Cloud, businesses will need to trust their communications providers in a way never seen before. It is up to the telecoms industry to ensure that they are even more reliable and secure than today operators that manage to do this successfully will prosper in the new telecoms landscape.