BT's in-house boffins name their technologies for the future

The boffins at BT's Adastral Park research centre have been telling the telco which technologies they believe will be most important in the future.

Today's hot favourites are voice-over-IP, wireless local networks, xDSL and XML. But looking forward five years they pinpointed 3G, fibre-to-the kerb (cabled homes), home networks and online fraud detection as the hot technologies to watch.

BT's incubator division BrightStar is hoping to use the in-house knowledge and talent to create new products and companies.

Chris Winter, CTO at Adastral Park, admitted there is nothing stopping one of its technologists leaving to form their own start-up, but he added: "There is now a vehicle for them to exploit their ideas, instead of simply handing them over to the company they work for. It's a real shame BT didn't do it earlier."

BT's techies also predict that within 10 years the internet will be all but unavoidable. A majority of them believe wearable computers will start attracting teenagers within five years and 94 per cent believe home working will be the norm in 10 years' time.

Over half the researchers at Adastral Park have already filed at least one patent.