But This One Goes To 4G

from the I-want-5G dept

I have to admit that, in the back of my head, there's always been this gnawing complaint about technology trends: if we understand things like Moore's law and how technology is likely to advance over time, why doesn't someone just figure out a way to work on the type of stuff that shouldn't be available for five or ten years and just beat everyone else to market? Yes, obviously, it's the incremental changes that are necessary in order to make those leaps, but every once in a while, it's an amusing diversion to think about. On a more realistic note, there are plenty of stories about nations that were way behind in some technology who leap ahead of other nations because they don't have legacy system to deal with. That's now happening in some places that never had a strong telecom infrastructure, but who quickly set up mobile phone systems. Now, (found over at TheFeature) India is saying that they're going to skip 3G wireless technology altogether and go straight to 4G. Of course, they don't give a timeframe - which could be important because there really isn't a 4G technology out there (though, some may claim that some of the wireless broadband offerings from folks like Flarion, ArrayComm or IPWireless are "4G"). Either way, it does make you think about the incremental changes in technology and whether or not it might just make sense to leapfrog certain incremental steps to get to where we really want to go.
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  1. identicon
    Richard, 29 May 2004 @ 4:59pm

    You can see this in other places...

    See, for example, the developers of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. They're developing games for hardware platforms that weren't even conceivable by most people when their development started. Look back a year or two and see how many people thought the latest nvidia or ati cards would exist. Then reduce that to the set of people willing to bet their business on it.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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