>I find it hard to believe that any company would put mission critical
>communications on the Internet. Isn't it too slow and unstable?
>Aren't bandwidth bottlenecks going to be with us for years to come?
These questions surprise me. In every case the answer the opposite of what you must think. Consequently, you haven't accepted the awesome potential of the internet, not as Electronic Commerce or sources of information, but as the missing link in ubiquitous communications.
Unwanted surfers are kept away from critical data by firewalls and encryption. The internet can be as secure as any normal corporate WAN.
As for speed, the performance of the internet is getting better, not worse. Already it is fast and stable enough for many mission critical applications. Recall that Metcalf was obliged to eat his words that the internet would be taken to its knees in 1996. It didn't. Even as the number of users continued to skyrocket, by any standard internet performance improved. (Admittedly some ISP's don't have enough phone lines, but that's not the fault of the internet.)
Bandwidth is only a problem getting multi-media into the home. Most future EID's require extremely small bandwidth. Consider a medical EID monitoring your heartbeat. Occasionally, the EID must report to the hospital server your status, consisting of a few hundred characters of data. Once or twice in a lifetime, an alarm goes off and it communicates an emergency code to the hospital, describing your heartbeat and your physical location. The server checks around, and transmits back instructions about what to check, when to report, etc. Meanwhile the server notifies an ambulance to fetch you, and issues instructions to prepare for emergency treatment upon your arrival. Not much data traffic in all of this.
As another example, look at existing EID systems, like QCOM's OmniTrack system to track trucks and the like. The amount of data transmitted by these systems is miniscule.
I would guess that 99.99% of all future EIDS have miniscule bandwidth requirements. The others will have larger demands mainly because of multi-media applications.
The important thing if for EID to be constantly in touch, not talking all the time.
By the way, notice that Java will play a role in most EIDs, if any, as a better programming language, not as a dynamic way to alter logic. C/C++ is perfectly adequate for programming most EIDs, and will be preferred at least until Java and the VJM have stabilized.
Allen |
