EyeForWireless: Wirelessly Converging
A presentation from IBM puts all these "will this tech kill this tech?" press stories into perspective by showing how all the different network technologies that are converging. Again, not anything new, but a good overview and does a good job putting everything into perspective by stepping away from the technology and looking at what the consumer will eventually get: a single way to get voice, video and data wherever they are. All the various technologies are simply means to that end. While different technologies may fight it out to get there (and there's room for more than one), that's the end goal. On top of this, while most people talk about the "triple play" of voice, video and data - the really interesting thing is that it's not just one pipe providing all 3 things, but that those three things start to bleed across each other to offer new applications and opportunities that weren't available before when everything is separate. What comes out of this are applications that no one could have predicted, but which people will find incredibly useful. As for the timing on all of this, it's already happening, though there are likely to be many pitfalls (welcome to the market economy) as we go. Right now, reliability and security are still holding back certain applications, but should become less of an issue going forward as the technology matures.
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