Connectivity is becoming more ubiquitous for all of us. And this connectivity generates incredible amounts of data. Some data that might seem useless to you is a gold mine to someone else. This gold mine of data gets sliced, diced, and analyzed to become meaningful in some way to someone. Analyzing past data and the outcomes from that data is how trends are seen and future “predictions” are made.
The relentless logic of computers analyzing data has allowed them to make some incredibly accurate and seemingly “intelligent” observations. Is the artificial intelligence age here yet? What will 2020 have in store for us?
From the perspective of connectivity, much of this data is coming from some kind of mobile network. I’ll refrain from writing too much about 5G in this article though. I’m sure many others will share their thoughts on the role of 5G in 2020, and we all read about 5G seemingly everyday. It will come some day. Probably in 2020. But what I want to write about is WiFi.
#1: WIFI is here to Stay
WiFi seems to have taken a backseat to 5G in terms of industry hype. But we all still use it. A lot. Just think about how often you’re using it everyday, perhaps without even thinking about it. And WiFi continues to become ever more important as we continue the trend of using it to offload traffic from cellular networks - even the new 5G networks. Who knows what the pricing plans for 5G will even be? If “all you can eat” isn’t easy or affordable, WiFi will become even more important than it is today.
Even within an office environment, it’s becoming more common for connections to your business phone system to be over WiFi - whether from a WiFi desk phone, a laptop softphone, or from a business phone system app that rings on your smartphone (which can be connected via WiFi or through a high speed cellular network). So it’s important that we do not underestimate or forget the importance of WiFi in 2020.
Jim Machi,
VP of Marketing,
Sangoma
#2: BIG DATA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
From the perspective of intelligence (I wrote about this last year, and I’m going to write about it again), the increase in speed and data capacity from these faster and fatter networks will continue to yield a lot of data. The mining of this big data will create “smarter” communications applications that can seemingly figure out what your next moves are, based on past history and the experience of other users.
Because more intelligent communications applications - like better interactive voice response (IVR), conference calls, and call routing - can be created, users will be able to have a much better and probably quicker experience. And, potentially, these experiences will be less frustrating. Although, with some of these more poorly designed programs, users can absolutely recognize that they are talking to a computer, which can absolutely get severely frustrating. But, over time, they’ll continue to improve.
Can this be considered artificial intelligence yet? Probably not, it’s just “smarter” software. But the case for it could be made as these programs do continue to learn based on the ever-increasing data sets they are fed. It just depends on what your definition of artificial intelligence is.
All things considered, 2020 should be a year of continued mobile connectivity, growth, and continued “output” from all the many data collection sources.
