'Tis the time to look ahead at the opportunities and challenges we have in store for 2009.

2008 has given us some interesting starting points for the new year.  The economy is going through a roller coaster of speculation, recovery, opportunity, and of course huge losses in value. 

We are starting to see the old world of copper "land lines" fail (such as the bankruptcy of Hawaiian Telcom in Nov 2008).  The companies with money are aggressively expanding their long distance and local loop fiber optic networks in an attempt to keep ahead of demand driven by Internet and entertainment.  Examples of this are Verizon's FIOS and the AT&T U-verse.

Wireless access is becoming universal, not only with local access points, but also with EVDO access provided by the wireless carriers.  You would have to be in the middle of Death Valley to actually break the tether of being wired into the global grid.

Speaking of GRID, GRID computing has grown up, and is now  part of a newer, bigger, and better high performance compute architecture becoming known as "cloud computing."  Cloud is complicated to be sure, however at the simplest level it can be considered a network-enabled marriage of GRID computing and Software as a service (SaaS).  This is a very rapidly developing technology that will continue to find its place in entertainment, logistics, research, banking, and nearly all other industries that require high performance computing located adjacent to network access points.

Now a couple predications:

1. Traditional "Telco" companies begin to die.  The world has spoken - it wants packet networks.  There will be a few old style telecom companies that continue milking the last few remaining drops of  telephone or telephone calling card business, however those companies have a very limited life expectancy.  Face it, who among us does not have either a mobile phone, or broadband Internet in the home and office?  We don't need plain old telephone service (POTS) any more.

2.  Cloud computing will become a serious player.  The need for companies to crunch more numbers, have zero or near zero latency within their trading communities, and save operational expenses by outsourcing their data center requirements to cloud providers will grow quickly during 2009.

3.  Wireless and EVDO broadband Internet access will become a commodity, with price points that nearly all can afford.  Laptops already come with EVDO access options, and we will be surprised to see persons who live a mobile life without an "AirCard" or similar network access device.

4.  IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6)  will start to take hold.  Nearly everybody in the Internet community knows the current IPv4 address space is nearly exhausted.  However nearly everybody is still trying to find "work arounds" that help them avoid migrating to IPv6.  Time is up.  IPv4 is nearing death, and v6 will become part of all our lives.

That's about it for me - sure there are a lot of other great predications I've missed.  Send me a note and let me know what you think, and if you believe there is something major we have missed.