Future Tense — Always On

Read­ers of this site know that I’m a pro­po­nent of liv­ing an always con­nected lifestyle. My pre­vi­ous views on the sub­jects looked to appli­ca­tions that lived partly on the edge of the net­work and partly off it, a class of appli­ca­tions I called Hybrid Com­put­ing.

As broad­band access to the net becomes more preva­lent, those appli­ca­tions will increas­ingly shift to a net-only model. We’re already see­ing this switch with appli­ca­tions like web­mail or search, which are purely web-based. Sim­i­larly, appli­ca­tions like desk­top search now inte­grate with an online com­po­nent (for exam­ple, Google Desk­top Search allows you to store doc­u­ments on their server or ser­vices like Plaxo allow you to store data in an online repos­i­tory and resync it with dif­fer­ent devices) and move data back and forth.

As broad­band access con­tin­ues to increase, the impor­tant part is not just the speed (although it is an impor­tant fac­tor since it allows for richer online expe­ri­ences) but I would ven­ture that the more crit­i­cal part of broad­band access is the always-on point. Because a broad­band con­nec­tion does not require to dial-in, it is increas­ingly becom­ing ubiq­ui­tous. Much as peo­ple do not think about the sys­tems of fil­tra­tion and deliv­ery that pro­vide water to their house or the sys­tems of power gen­er­a­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion that allow them to use elec­tric­ity, the preva­lence of broad­band will decrease dis­cus­sions of what is on the net and what is off it. Appli­ca­tions will just be there and a cloud of con­nec­tiv­ity will exist around all of us.

To this end, two poten­tial sce­nar­ios could play out: the first one would see the com­mu­ni­ca­tion providers (tele­phone com­pa­nies, cable com­pa­nies, etc…) con­tinue to pro­vide dif­fer­ent access points around the globe. How­ever, another poten­tial sce­nario could develop around the area of a mesh net­work that would tie all users together in a peer-to-peer net­work that would be man­aged by every sin­gle user. One could envi­sion each com­put­ing device con­nected to the cloud to allow for some traf­fic to go through. Because the pro­to­cols that dic­tate inter­net based com­mu­ni­ca­tions have been designed to dis­trib­ute com­mu­ni­ca­tions across a num­ber of points (what is called, in more tech­ni­cal terms, pack­e­tized com­mu­ni­ca­tion), one could envi­sion a sce­nario where an increas­ing amount of com­mu­ni­ca­tion would hap­pen in areas inde­pen­dent of the sys­tems pro­vided by the com­mu­ni­ca­tion providers.

The rise of always on, always fast com­mu­ni­ca­tion can already be seen in some coun­tries like South Korea, where such thing is con­sid­ered so com­mon­place that few peo­ple bother dis­cussing it. The United States, unfor­tu­nately, are start­ing to fall behind on this and, because large telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion providers are try­ing to pro­tect their monop­oly on access to the high speed lines, efforts to increase speed and cov­er­age could be impeded. How­ever, in the long run, some­thing like a mesh net­work could make an end-run around the tele­com com­pa­nies, which would then put such deci­sions in the hands of users.

This is the sec­ond arti­cle in a 6 part series. You can read the fol­low­ing parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Par­tic­i­pa­tory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

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