What is the future trend of communications ?

Answer:
IP communications - Everything over IP (EoIP) :D
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Everything over IP, is a collective term for the immerging culture of communicating and transporting data, of all sorts, over IP. VoIP Voice over IP is one of the first to lexically join the club. Although Post over IP (POIP), Company information, marketing and even trade over IP (HTML), News over IP, Games over IP are all embedded in the world of IP for many years.

The distance we have already come into EoIP is evident by the way we treat email and surfing as a part of life. Other medias, have yet to be marketed under the EoIP banner and like the previous technology may not be specifically associated with EoIP; TV and Radio over IP are available if under other names, Video over IP has been used for many years if under other guises used for person to person calls, conferences, eLearning, and many other uses. Books, Films and Music downloading is becoming the norm and IP internet connections are as important, to many people, as other services, electricity, gas, water, both domestically and in business. eBanking, eCommerce, stock prices and trading are all available over IP. International and inter-bank money transfers, ATM machines, credit card processing; online or in shops connect to each other over IP.

Many countries around the world are engaging in eGovernment and other types of digital citizenship. Signing documents legally with some form of digital signature will one day be the norm for everything from buying a house, getting married to voting, accessing education, taking exams and international travel. Medicine is not left out of this, there are many devices that can assist today with diagnosis, monitoring, drug administration and even surgery and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

British Telecom is spending £10,000,000,000 on a project called 21st Century Network (21CN), transforming the whole UK phone system to VoIP over the next 3 years. Leaving everyone with just a high speed DSL IP connection or an analogue voice only line (POTS), converted to VoIP at the exchange. The 21CN project will provide the UK with a pure IP communications network, another step and a mental shift in to the EoIP world.

Other countries such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea have thriving digital communities that are making the most of EoIP.

The term Everything over IP is a good way to name the direction we are going in (2007), but it is not a technology is it a buzzword or aspiration, filling in vocabulary as needed. This acronym has it is use now but will fade from the lime light when EoIP is as much the norm as email.

EoIP is of course not totally accurate until science makes some quite large jumps. It will be a long time before we have Me over IP and probably by then, if ever, IP will only be demonstrated in history museums, which you will of course visit over whatever the new communication protocol of the day is.