Will we ever go back to working in bricks and mortar offices? asks Softil’s Anatoli Levine
It’s a common fact that you can’t drive forward and look into the rearview mirror at the same time. But the rearview mirror is an important driving instrument…it lets you better understand where you are and what might be coming your way. So, let’s start by quickly reviewing our 2020 predictions for the telecoms industry and see how we fared.
Our technology predictions set out for 2020 called for the expansion of CBRS usage, saw 5G moving forward albeit slowly, forecast that voice would become the new User Interface, automation would increase via the combination of IoT, analytics and AI, and Edge computing capabilities would become more widely used in the industry.
How did we do? Well, all these areas are still actively in play and it’s safe to say that the best of these technologies is yet to come. So, we can say that our forecasts did somewhat okay, but there are no revelations to be had out of what we saw at the end of 2019. If we repeated the exact same predictions this year for 2021, we would still do okay - but a big reason for not doing that is … oh, what a transforming year 2020 became.
The COVID-19 pandemic, the leitmotif of 2020, flipped all technological prospects and priorities, and caused significant shift of focus in many areas. While all the technologies we talked about in 2019 will continue their advancement at the same or maybe even higher pace in 2021, we would like to shift the focus of our 2021 predictions, making it more pragmatic and possibly (unfortunately?) a bit less futuristic.
In short, 2021 will be the year of communications. Of course, which year was not for the past 25 years? Well, yes, communications always were the key element of progress, but with the dramatic shift to “remote” and “virtual” affecting both personal lifestyle and the work environment, communication capabilities are even more important to help humans better compensate for the unfortunate realities of our new normal life with restricted mobility and human contact.
Here are the five most impactful trends for 2021:
#1: Video Communications
Video communications, often called videoconferencing, is old news. Or it was old news until 2020 delivered an unimaginable punch and sent the majority of the world’s population to work and study from home. Videoconferencing became the savior, allowing some normalcy to continue for hundreds of millions of lives.
Videoconferencing capabilities offered today by Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, GoToMeeting and others are quite formidable solutions compared to what was available five years ago – ease of use, high quality of audio and video, reliability, virtual backgrounds are among just some of the latest advances in videoconferencing technology. But the journey is far from over.
Videoconferencing is still a focused activity, requiring preparation, proper setting, scheduling and more. In 2021, we should expect videoconferencing capabilities to become easier to use, while also beefing up security. The widespread use of videoconferencing might even bring back some of the old research projects – for example, the EU-sponsored AMI Project, where metadata of all sorts was established during the call to fully analyze the dynamics of conversation for dominance and other essential characteristics.
Voice UI, better presentation capabilities similar to those offered by the mmHmm startup, use of AR/VR/MR will be the subject of widespread research and innovation throughout 2021. Heck, we might even see some of the companies building virtual Walls of Presence similar to the one Orange (then France Telecom) enacted between offices, allowing people to meet for a coffee without the need to travel anywhere – one day, maybe Star Treck’s Holodeck might just become part of every house.
In saying that, we overshoot 2021 by a few good years, but it serves to emphasize that video communications improvements and better functionality are definitely on the go right now – and will continue at pace.
The question is, however, with the remarkable gains in employee productivity seen by industry this year through home and virtual conferencing, will we ever go back to just working in bricks and mortar? Will videoconferencing become the new permanent norm?
#2: Virtual events
Physical exhibitions like MWC, IWCE and CCW are not gone forever. The real handshake is still important, but it will have to wait for some time. Meanwhile, videoconferencing is the way that industry executives will meet for the majority of 2021 and maybe beyond so exhibition organizers will need to embrace the virtual world as much as possible to survive.
For the majority of cases, this is easier said than done. Physical attendees are much easier to engage with once they are at an event – replicating the same in the format of a virtual event is much more difficult. Is there a concept of a “booth” applicable in the format of the virtual exhibit? How do you have a conversation, make eye contact and gauge interest? None of these questions are easy – but they need to be answered, so we should expect to see lots of innovation in this space.
#3: Virtual banking
Anatoli Levine,
Director of Products
& Standards,
Softil
Virtual banking is yet another “old news” topic – or is it? Even in the pre-pandemic days, video had great potential for the banking industry, especially for operations in rural areas. Now that video is universally acceptable, and banking is often done with the help of the mobile phone, adding video to banking applications is a no brainer.
But, exacerbated by the pandemic, new areas will start taking advantage of virtual banking capabilities – look at the mortgage industry as an example. You still need to guarantee security, you still need to ensure privacy, you still need to allow electronic signatures to be verified and accepted – this space is ripe for innovation.
#4: Telehealth
Who has not experienced telehealth? What was once thought as a rural healthcare solution quickly evolved with the pandemic to become the best tool for healthcare practitioners to help patients – without the risk of catching the infection from them or infecting them.
But telehealth capabilities are still very limited in standard patient visits, mostly subsiding to a conversation (which cannot be underestimated, but in most cases, is insufficient). Meanwhile, the capabilities of even today’s basic smartphones and smart watches in terms of obtaining a variety of health care data at any time, all the time, is mind-boggling, and it should be bridged with telehealth applications. And we haven’t even begun looking into the IoT space, where lots of gadgets are available to interconnect, measure, analyze, alert, and more. MRI at home, anyone?
#5: Automatic translation
Little by little, automatic translation got to the point of being simply good. Not even good enough, but just good. You can easily translate books, articles, and websites online, often at a very reasonable time and cost. Now, the next thing to do is to have a little box you can speak into, which will instantly translate your speech into the foreign language of choice – something we saw before only in the science fiction movies (yes, this box can be your smartphone).
Think about being on a conference call where everything you say is instantly translated and captioned to every participant in their native language. Imagine such automatic translation in the format of the telehealth or virtual banking visits – the possibilities are endless, and we should expect to see great new applications in the translation space.
Are these five trends for 2021 rather simplistic predictions for the telecoms industry? Of course, they are. But bear in mind that work never stopped pre 2021 in improving advanced mobile networking (never mind 5G, you can even say hello to the 6G if you are so inclined), virtual networks, AR/VR/MR, edge computing, and the Internet of Everything.
But the need to better communicate in our new world of limited physical contact is so dire that we believe it is worth additional attention – hence the annual dusting off of our magic crystal ball and the above suggestions. What do you see in your crystal ball?
