For years Bob Frankston has advocating ambient connectivity. I like much of the idea, but his discussions tend to not very concrete.
Bob recently published a new paper in IEEE's XPlore;
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The Internet is really about connectivity. Because connecting at a distance (networking) used to be very hard, we tend to focus on distance rather than relationships. It is really about transcending the mechanics of distance so
we can focus on what we want to accomplish. This is not obvious because, as with any new technology, we tend to view it as if it were the same old thing but just a little better.
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The end points of these destinations represent the relationships between applications and their users. These relationships exist entirely outside the facilities used to exchange bits. Here, I am careful to avoid talking about networks because that is the old paradigm. Today, we can use any means or path to exchange bits. When we are interconnecting our LANs, we infrastructure as just one possible resource for exchanging bits. Yet, as we have seen, a primary focus of communications engineering is pipes and channels. More importantly, the business model of telecommunications is all about monetizing the path through the control of pipes.
We can see the problems with the pipe model in living color when we look at spectrum allocation—the idea of creating channels by assigning a is as if we only used shirt color to distinguish between people. Of course, there would be confusion when two people with the same color sat near each other. In practice, we do not confine ourselves to a single channel of information; we use rich information including both what we see and what we know. Calling this confusion interference makes it seem as if we have a physics problem rather than simply a problem that emerges from narrow-minded heuristics.
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We achieve ambient connectivity by enabling us to communicate by exchanging bits. We can do this very locally by using the wires and radios within our homes and cover the local geographic area by working with friends and neighbors and hiring people (or vendors) to facilitate the exchange of bits. This idea of facilitating is similar to getting together to pave sidewalks and roads. We can walk on the grass, but sidewalks and roads make it easier. We extend our ability to do networking by working together. The network is then an emergent property just like the road system, which emerges from all the individual efforts. We can make roads seem more like a unified system by putting up route number signs. Local ownership makes the users stakeholders in their own fate. This should be obvious. Why do we find it so difficult to escape the idea that the Internet is just another broadband telecommunications service?
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There are some large forces at work to prevent the realization of Bob's or other similar notions. My guess is mobile devices may be much more disruptive to te telecoms than they think...
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