That was the year that was, it’s over, let it go’ – but not before a quick look back at 2007 and a peek at what the new year might offer. 

It is self evident that we live in convergent times.   But not many proud and long-established organisations take their convergent industry message to heart and willingly merge themselves with others.   The CMA enters its 50^th glorious year with undiminished enthusiasm for enterprise networks of all shapes and sizes - but now under the bigger umbrella of the British Computer Society.  Not a moment too soon you might say from the perspective of a comms manager who has to continually remind his colleagues in the IT department that there’s a C embedded in ICT.

In truth the year has been so full of convergence stories that it’s a wonder we’re not now all stuck together in one big blob of fully-conformant self-satisfied interoperability – but, as anyone who has ever tried looking after kindergarten children will know, there’s always one little brat at every party who will not join hands to play ring-a-roses or jump up and down in time with the others.

So it was with great joy that we saw some of the brats taken to task for misbehaving in the mobile roaming game.  It needed the European Commission to do this because there’s little enthusiasm in the UK for saying boo to bullies – even if it’s your job to look after consumer and citizen interests.

It’s even more remarkable that the Broadband Stakeholders Group are ending the year with real momentum behind the Pipe Dreams vision for a fully fibred UK.   Applause please for whoever re-assigned Stephen Timms MP to be competition minister at the renamed and repurposed DTI.  The department with a mission for ’Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’ now knows it has a mountain to climb in 2008.  I’m told that to work there you don’t have to be able to roll your R’s but  the ‘voice for business across Government’ will get the new year off to a cracking start when it clarifies the policy objectives that our industry regulator should be trying to achieve.

Unraveling the mystery of why DSL networks sometime behave in curiously unpredictable ways was another great 2007 achievement.  Was it really surprising those running the UK’s dominant network didn’t know that the combined effects of their network’s jitter, delay and packet loss could actually be predicted and circumvented?

But if we were to highlight a single star performer across all of CMA’s 2007 membership events my vote would go to Fabien Maisl of Cirpack who twice trekked to London to make network managers clasp their heads in wonder at how much greener the broadband scene seems to be in foreign fields.  Next year we might hope for visitors from The Netherlands and Sweden to demonstrate that France has not been alone in providing infrastructure exemplars for careful study by those repurposed chaps at DBERR.

By the time you read this we will be into new year parties and resolutions – so here’s a competition to get your folks thinking about the network scene in 2008.  Point your browser at the responses to Ofcom’s recent consultations and extract some choice cuts.  Then ask folks to try matching the names of respondents to the responses they’ve given.

Prizes will be awarded for surprises – which, methinks, is no bad mission for the year ahead.

This editorial was first published in NetworkingPlus magazine - December 2007