RSSAnalysts: Hundreds of billions in wireless productivity gains
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published June 3, 2008, 9:13 AM
Last Friday, an Ovum Research report added an additional $260 billion to its 2005 forecast of $600 billion in productivity gains that wireless technology is expected to add to the American economy over the next ten years.
In an interview with BetaNews Monday, Ovum analyst Roger Entner attributed some of the disparity between the two numbers to "faster adoption and more applications than originally expected," and the rest to a slight difference in the time frames studied in the two reports.
"Only ten years ago, people were wondering what wireless phones could do for them. Now, they can't live without [wireless phones]," Entner noted during a recent webcast.
There is a slight time adjustment: The "2005 Ovum Report on the Impact of the US Wireless Telecom Industry on the US Economy" projected gains for a ten-year period that would end in 2015; last Friday's follow-up extends that period to 2016. "Other than that, though, the comparison is as 'apples to apples' as possible," Entner told us.
Future productivity gains will be particularly evident among small businesses and in the health care industry, according to the Ovum analyst. Factors playing into the productivity increases will range from emerging wireless broadband services to faster and more efficient decision-making, improvements in logistics, "reductions of unproductive travel time," and replacement of landline phones.
Also in the updated report, Ovum predicts that by 2016, the US will have 81 million mobile wireless enterprise users -- and that 83 percent of them will be outfitted with wireless broadband.
"Factors playing into the productivity increases will (include) and replacement of landline phones."
An improvement in productivity due to that particular factor will be fascinating to see. Communication is communication. You can certainly augment it, but simply replacing it does not increase communication that already existed.
Of course, publications such as Network World are predicting a similar increase in security issues as a direct result of the growing wireless trend (aside from the fact that so many real transactions are continuing to become virtual and the even greater issues that larger issue portends!!) and the incredible lack of implementation and compliance of such security standards as PCI Data Security Standard and the real damages resulting from said incursions - a problem so significant that they extend to the point of some in the field even suggesting an abandonment of the credit card and ATM formats (yeah, right!)!`
Its one thing to herald the advent of something, its another to actually implement such an 'advance' in a responsible manner.
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