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Telecom repeatedly thumbed its nose at the average Kiwi and the organisation set up to protect their rights (The Commerce Commission) -- but that didn't surprise too many of us.

Broadband became slightly more affordable and a little bit faster, albeit in a non-competitive way.

The Whoosh of a wireless challenge became more of a puff of insignificance and for the vast majority of Kiwis, Telecom is the only broadband game in town.

But what of next year, what predictions can we make for the coming 12 months?

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Well I don't expect to see much (if any) movement in broadband pricing. From what I hear, the uptake continues to be steady so there's little need for Telecom to drop its pricing -- especially when it's able to keep its competition at arm's length by controlling the local loop as it does.

Wireless will stagnate even more than it has. Sure, companies like Whoosh will continue to roll out new nodes but their beancounters will pretty soon realise that they're just not able to spin a profit and investors will want to see a return sooner rather than later.

I strongly suspect the answer to this will be a lot of "spin" and an attempt to float the company so that the early investors can take their money and run at the expense of those who are prepared to invest on a promise of future riches.

And on the subject of stupid floats, I predict that IndraNet, the company that I've written about a couple of times in the past (1, 2) will not come up with either it's long-promised intelligent networking solutions or its air-powered car.

Oh, and while I remember (although I'm going back a few years now), why aren't all NZ's vehicle fleet fitted with these devices yet? Jim??

I predict that FireFox will make *huge* inroads into the browser market this year and that Microsoft will spend more time throwing FUD than improving its own now rather aged and rickety Internet Explorer.

The best thing about FireFox's success will be that it opens the eyes of the public to the fact that not everything you run on your PC needs to come from Microsoft. There will be a small (but perceptible) spin-off for other open source software as well.

The bad news is that I predict the growth in Linux on desktops has peaked and that Microsoft will regain some of the small ground it has lost in this area. Of course Linux will continue to grow its market share in the server (especially webserver) market.

The long awaited 3G mobile phone services will start to trickle out this year but I suspect they'll be far from the instant success that the telcos would like. In true telco style, they'll try to make a profit from these new services right from day one, instead of offering sensible prices that will encourage better uptake and more usage.

Greg from MIS predicts that "music and/or software will be available for sale on data chips that involve no moving parts in a player at all" and I'd agree with him -- if it weren't for the fact that we're only just seeing the recording industry realise that the Net could be a good way to sell music. Give them another five years Greg and perhaps they'll wake up to solid-state storage :-)

Well, that's it from me for another year.

I'd like to offer a huge thanks to IHUG who have been brave enough to sponsor this column for the past 18 months. Given my current circumstances Aardvark would surely have folded by now without this support and I think it's worth reminding all regular readers of this -- so that when you next need to purchase services that the sponsor offers, you might want to add a few extra points to their column when drawing up your shortlist.

And of course I'd like to thank you -- the thousands of readers who make Aardvark one of their regular stops on the information superhighway each day. If there was nobody reading this it wouldn't be worth writing it would it?

I'll be back after New Year's with more of the stuff I hope you want to read and more of the news that makes technology so damned interesting.

A happy new year to one and all.

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