Last night I went to dinner and met Hossein Eslambochi, the CTO and CIO of AT&T. It was a speech/dinner with other media tech people from companies like Sony & Tribune. I spoke with Hossein briefly and he's a bright, truly technical person. Unlike many 'buzzword and hand waving' types, he understands the underlying technical issues and can talk intelligently about them. A rare ability in the modern world of CTOs where MBAs often take precedence over engineering types.

Hossein gave a brief talk about AT&T and what they are doing these days. Much of is was standard mom & apple pie customer focus talk, but he did give his Top Ten Trends. I thought you all might be interested.

10. Information mining will transform the way we do business
          Personalization and customization will become the norm.
9. Home LANs will proliferate
          Use of home LANs for telephone service, dual cellular/wifi phones
8. Wireless & wired lines will converge - accelerating virtualization
          Seamless connectivity
7. Security is critical
6. Death of Locality
          IP based environment eliminates the role of geography
5. Convergence of communications & computers will be a reality
          Convergence of phone & computers will outshine convergence of television & computers
4. Sensor networks will be everywhere
          All items and people will have IP addresses and be tracked
3. Wireless internet will be big
          Not what we are used to, more like 40-50Mb/s everywhere you go
2. Broadband will be common
          As common as telephones are today
1. IP will eat everything
          90-95% of the worlds communications will be via IP traffic

I don't agree with everything, but the everywhereness of net connectivity is reassuring to hear from AT&T, the people would actually have to carry it out. With them sticking to standards based technology, hopefully the future will arrive with an abundance of choices instead of difficult choices between incompatible systems.