Desperate to download - the future of the PC

It's 2016 and you're sitting down to start the day's work. No meetings of sufficient importance today to justify the cost of the commute to the office, so all the work can be done at home.

Wake up the screen, and you see a couple of your team members are already at work. You'll have a video-conference with them a bit later, but now it's time to read the overnight emails and check the industry news sites and trusted analysts' blogs that smart software agents have dragged down for you.

The bank balance icon is glowing reassuringly green in the corner, meaning your pay went in. Red would mean a deduction, which, since you haven't authorised any payments over the past few hours, could be cause for alarm.

One of your co-workers sees you're at your desk, and requests a voice call. It all comes over the same fibre network from the utility company, with a wireless back-up from another provider just in case. The copper phone line was mined five years ago, sold off by Telecom's receivers and turned into something more useful.

On your calendar you see a seminar later in the morning for the diploma you are taking. Apart from a two day induction and a fortnightly evening seminar with others in the same city, the course is run by email, web exercises and video links.

You will also take some time to choose a movie for tonight and download it. Or you could chose from any number of soaps or TV series – perhaps a nostalgic look at Desperate Housewives, or Lost.

Your programme subscriptions are already waiting to be viewed, and you can see the spare screen you keep for news and sport out of the corner of your eye.

Imagining the future is a tricky business. According to Mike Ruettgers, the former chief executive of storage technology giant EMC, predictions about the impact of technology are always too high for the short term and too low for the long term.

There is also the phenomenon that the hive mind, which is how some people see the internet, can behave in different ways than all the well trained Masters of Business Administration would have us believe.

There is also the age factor. Most of the people making the predictions are older than the majority of people making the decisions about where to go on the internet and what to do with it. That's planetary demographics. What percentage of people over 25 have a MySpace space? It's probably far lower than those with an Amazon account.

Playing "real-time" games online will also be a breeze with hide and seek shoot 'em ups being the most popular. And the recipe for this evening's meal is just a few clicks away.

Elon University in North Carolina and the Pew internet and American Life Project have conducted predictive surveys of the internet covering the past 15 years.

Reading through the predictions made in the early 1990s by the internet pioneers, it's interesting to see what still seems wise and what has been proved wrong or so last century.

"The computer will increasingly replace the commuter," said Gerald Celente back in 1993, well before Peak Oil became front page fodder.

Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the source code for HTML that made the world wide web possible, was looking at the technology curve that will bring the internet to every home.

"I'm looking forward to the day when my daughter finds a rolled-up 1000-pixel-by-1000-pixel color screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge," Berners-Lee said in 1995.

The New Zealand Government's digital strategy is over a more modest five years, and a lot of it is about playing catch up from the dial-up drudge that most internet users in this country experience, because of our past telecommunications policy, or lack of one.

"New Zealand will be a world leader in using information and technology to realise its economic, social, environmental and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people," the strategy declares.

"Affordable high speed access" is the key. For that to happen, and for New Zealand to catch up with countries such as Korea, Japan and the more advanced European countries, it needs to get out of its copper mindset and on to fibre, with wireless to provide mobility.

Peter McCauley, a former internet New Zealand chief executive and now programme manager for the New Zealand Digital Strategy, says too many people here have bought into the myth that bandwidth is a commodity in short supply.

"Bandwidth is infinite, it's just a matter of laying more fibre in the ground to meet demand. It's not like radio waves, where the spectrum needs to be regulated because it gets saturated," he says.

"Traffic is traffic, content is content, and at this stage video is the most significant part of traffic, all the other stuff goes along with it."

The reason we still go out on a cold and rainy night and browse the racks at the DVD rental store is because our internet access is too slow and/or expensive to download a movie or TV show. Take away that limitation and someone's business model just disappears.

Hollywood films and top television shows will account for many of the downloads.

McCauley says that is why New Zealand needs some sort of content provider service, so popular material is not soaking up international bandwidth.

"The latest episode of Desperate Housewives should be streaming from a New Zealand server, not from 3000 streams across the Pacific," he says.

Other material starting to appear on sites such as MySpace and YouTube will also become far more important.

"Content that people develop themselves will have a huge impact. People have their digital camera, they make a home movie, then they want to make it available for their friends or anyone else who may be interested.

"This is going to create a huge range of niche markets. People are going to move into community and individual markets for content, and you will be part of 20 different communities."

It's an idea that has taken off worldwide, and the only way you are likely to see the results is by downloading them.

McCauley believes what will really drive the spread of real broadband in New Zealand will be the arrival of a set top box "which will allow you to watch rugby any way you want".

He points to French company Illiad which is giving away set top boxes and offering a range of multimedia over the internet along with free telephone calling to anyone on the network.

McCauley says the subscription revenue from such a model could be enough to get the banks to cough up the $1.75 billion required to get fibre to almost every New Zealand home.