Technology in the 'Noughties'

The ‘Noughties’ was the decade where the more you knew and spent time using computers the cooler you were - geeks had become mainstream! Everywhere you looked, there was something starting with "i" or ending in "dot com". Not to mention "2.0". And for the first time knowing the difference between HTTP and HTML made you seem, well... kind of happening.

The Noughties were a time when science fiction became fact. With websites that can enable everday people access a system that could pinpoint any location from space. And the first in which three-dimensional virtual worlds grew faster than the real one.

But the most important development of the last ten years – the one that made many of the others possible was the speed at which we access the internet.

The number of Europeans with internet access more than doubled in the last ten years, while the speeds they could reach skyrocketed. At the start of the decade, the number of homes and businesses with broadband was nothing in comparison to the part it plays now to so many millions.

While websurfers were stuck with a 56k modem ten years ago, most people today can download at 1.5 megabits per second or more. Back then it would have taken ten minutes to download a song over the internet. Now it takes seconds. Broadband internet is the reason we can watch YouTube, call people on Skype, browse flickr as fast as we like and refresh Twitter 7 times a minute.

If the internet left its mark on mainstream culture for the first time this decade, its influence will be even more pervasive in the next. Right now, a lot of Governments have already started work on creating a superfast broadband network that will see fibre-optic cables laid out to many towns and cities providing internet speeds that can’t be imagined today.

In the UK the government announced a '2 meg' Universal Service Commitment which confirms their ambitions that by 2012, everyone in the UK will be able to receive a broadband service on a line capable of downstream speeds of up to 2 Mbps.

But there will also be questions about what we can access and how. We can expect media companies to try and claw back the power they once had. Sky for example have looked hard at 'video on demand' with ‘Sky Player’ and they have just released ‘Sky Songs’ with a library of over 4 million music files for legal download.

It's been a big decade – but we're in for an even bigger one next where we are likely to see the disappearance of a number of media formats in the form of satellite dishes and DVD’s & CD’s forever with continued changes to how we enjoy entertainment in the home as the bandwidth speed ever increases! 


The digital age is here to stay...