British Telecommunications Plc’s scientists at its Advanced Application Division in Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, have been making predictions for the year 2020. Speech dialling, with recognition in switching equipment, will be commonplace, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches will be obsolete, having been replaced by photonic ones, say the soothsayers. Optical switches will be capable of handling 10,000 interactive video calls, delivering three-dimensional graphics and virtual reality, and a global broadband fibre optic network will be in place, with multiple channels carrying 100Gbps on a single fibre. And the seers predict that communications mechanisms other than those currently available will have been discovered.
