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A pair of somewhat unrelated news articles caught my attention
forcing me to look at what the near future might hold in store for us.
First, we have a quote from this press release:
"ResearchChannel,
in partnership with the University of Washington and the Poznan
Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), demonstrated High
Definition video transmitted across IP networks today at the TERENA
2005 conference in Poznan, Poland. Attendees observed HD programming
transmitted from ResearchChannel's DigitalWell digital asset management
system over advanced networks from Seattle, Wash., to Poznan, Poland,
at a rate of 270 megabits per second.
'As a new member of the ResearchChannel consortium we are
pleased to cooperate with the University of Washington to deliver high
quality HD transmission and present it at the TERENA Conference. This
enables us to showcase the demanding application which utilizes optical
networking technologies to deliver HD quality streams over IP,' said
Maciej Stroinski, Ph.D., technical director of PSNC. 'We expect a rapid
growth of such services, enabled through developments in optical
networking and IP, which will open new application possibilities in the
multimedia industry. We are committed to cooperate with ResearchChannel
in further research of this subject.'"
A
270Mbps video stream? What a technology like this hold for high
definition video communications? If this service were inexpensive
enough would Grammy subscribe to it so she could see her grandchildren
in living color? Would this be a service that wide adoption could be
expected? Would this kind of infrastructure finally make it possible
for real telecommuting to
take off? What kind of competitive advantages would this provide our
country once this type of infrastructure was installed everywhere -
like telephone service is now?
There is also this news story
today discussing the inability of even our newest not yet ratified
standard (802.11n) to meet our projected needs moving forward.
"'There
is a common opinion throughout academia, industry and business that the
current wireless technology fulfills neither current nor future
demands,'" according to those behind the Wireless Gigabit with Advanced
Multimedia (WIGWAM) project. This German-led consortium of corporate
and university researchers says 100Mbps is the bare minimum needed for
the future of wireless. It is using the 108Mbps 802.11n and MIMO
technology as the starting point for bringing 1Gbps wireless into
offices and homes." Yes, I know that the article
is talking about indoor LANs but the reality is that we are only an
extension of that technology. I also know that people who have real high speed LANs in their office would never go back to a 10baseT network or an original Token Ring network.
Like it or not we are moving towards connecting everywhere into a worldwide LAN (oxymorons anyone?) where data (of any kind, voice, video, etc,) can be exchanged at the blink of an eye.
To me, the question isn't if this will find its way into the mainstream but when.
Will wireless be able to handle this kind of extremes?
Only if we demand it. |
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