The push to wire the whole wide world has taken another brave
step forward. In a collaborative effort with UC Berkeley, Intel has developed a new wi-fi
platform that allows data to be transmitted more than 60 miles away
from the transmitter. Their focus is to bring connectivity to
remote areas all over the world, and the goal is to make it
commercially available in the second half of 2008.
Other methods of bringing wireless to a rural area, like laying
cable or using satellite connections, have proven to be impractical
and too expensive to implement. Intel’s Wi-fi radio is set to have
a $500 price point, and requires so little power that it could be
built to run on solar. The technology requires two devices to
operate. One is installed on the outskirts of an urban area, wired
to a local area network cable. The other goes to the previously
unconnected village, and viola!, the first Internet connection is
made.
Emerging markets are jumping on board, with devices already
installed in India, Panama, Vietnam, and South Africa. The
long-term implications for bolstering a rural community are
limitless, but the most immediate application is being used to
provide better healthcare.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, in his book “The Singularity is near”,
offers the possibility that computers will one day become
self-aware, which will result in the melding of humans and
machines. He sees this process well underway by 2025, as nanobots
begin to surf bloodstreams to combat disease and alter our brains
to increase intelligence.
In a recent article appearing in The Futurist, “Cybercrime in
the year 2025,” criminal-justice expert Gene Stephens predicts that
computer and Internet use will become seamless, as hands-free,
voice-activated data entry and retrieval becomes commonplace
between 2010 and 2015. By 2020, nanotech will increasingly impact
cyberspace; and as we try to gain the most advantages possible from
our new “wonder-net,” dangerous security gaps will emerge that
could turn into nightmares if not handled carefully.
For example, in 2025, as databots are implanted in users’
brains, secure firewalls must be developed to keep intruders from
hacking into the ‘bots and terrorizing recipients. “Could there be
a more frightening crime than having your brain-stored knowledge
erased or scrambled,” Stephens asks, “or hearing voices threatening
to destroy your memory unless you pay blackmail? Welcome to the
world of mindstalking.”
This brings us to the long-ignored issues of who owns the
Internet, manages it, and has jurisdiction over it. The answer now
is: nobody. Can this powerful socio-politico-economic network
continue to operate at random, open to all, and thus be vulnerable
to bad guys? Attempts to restrict or police the web are met with
idealists who believe that the Internet should always be free from
“big brother’s” interference. (cont.)
New
Scientist has posted a great vid detailing a major breakthrough
in wireless information transfer that could dramatically increase
download times and the overall speed of internet communication.
Using off the shelf components German researchers made the
first wireless video transmission in the terahertz range –
potentially 1000 times faster than existing wireless
technologies.
Such a breakthrough seems totally necessary if exponential
growth in technology and information is to continue, as those are
both dependent on faster human-to-human, human-to-machine and
machine-to-machine communication.
With Comcast slowing Internet speeds and other companies slow to bring fiber optic cable to consumers, it’s starting to seem more likely that wireless internet will by-pass all of this. Why spend the cost of installing fiber-optic cable when wireless internet will do just as well?
It reminds me of the country of Niger. The country was so late to the technology game that new, cheaper technology have allowed them to skip decades of advancement and costly infrastructure. They went from land lines (circa 1940) directly to cheap cell phones (circa 2008).
In fact, this is how much of the world by-passed the US in internet speed with fiber-optics. While we spent a decade laying out cable, other countries spent only a few years laying down the latest technology (fiber-optics).
In an article about lagging internet speeds in the US, reporter David Gardner explores some of the amazing statistics out there involving US internet speeds. “The median download speed in the U.S. is 2.35 Mbps. Densely populated Japan has an eye-popping 63.60 Mbps, according to figures from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.” In other words, not only is the US behind most of the developed world, we’re really behind.
You've got a laptop, a cellphone, a digital camera and at least one other gadget in your arsenal. Sadly, only your phone gets internet which costs about $60 a month. You thought about getting mobile internet for your laptop but that was another $60 plus the cost of the USB drive. You're tired of hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop looking for internet on trips. What do you do?
Novatel, a company specializing in mobile information technology, will soon release MiFi, a mobile WiFi system run through cellular phone lines. MiFi acts as your own personal WiFi system which you can link to from any of your mobile gadgets. On a road trip you can carry it along for any of your passengers to latch onto. With a 4 hour life-span or 40 hours on standby, business trips might be just that more bearable.
With Comcast 