Hi Jim,
You've given me new cause to want to make greater use of emoticons than I normally do, again. But even those wouldn't explain to the unsuspecting reader the rules of banter that have existed between Elmat and myself over the past ten years, so I shall make an effort to be less mysterious going forward.
Whether change is needed immediately or will need to evolve over a longer period of time is a subject I'm presently engaged in on another forum where yesterday I found myself writing the following (altough, I later realized that it was limited to a much narrower context than we're discussing here):
the majority of users wish to acquire that which they can
understand and appreciate, and only a minority will proceed in a
direction that pursues individually-fashioned connectivity. Individual
connectivity, in the end, is like a network comprised of lots of wire
but only a single Morse key and telegraph clacker. As violative as this
may seem to you and others here --including myself, at times-- consensus
and conformity will always be required if communication is to take place.
The foregoing was intended to set bounds surrounding the need for a sea change to take place, similar to what we're discussing here. I submit that the telecommunications universe has spawned capabilities that have become too diverse, too diffuse and fragmented, and, in many of the developed nations, far too embedded, to allow one to make generalizations about how long it will take for significant changes to materialize and eventually mature to the point where they will support any-to-any connectivity. And once they approach maturity, as with all things, it will once again be time to move on.
Looking more closely at some of the issues we've been discussing here, one could see how an individualized "broadband" service -- regardless of whether it is wireline or wireless -- is gradually replacing the type of "POTS" service that we touched upon earlier. One could even think of "broadband" as the natural extension to what began as operator-assisted calling, then party-lines, automatic dial exchanges, software-enabled CLASS-based feature sets, MPEG over ISDN, misguided forays into ATM clouds, and so on.
The underlying concepts haven't really changed all that much, although new layers of technology are constantly being added enabling us to use more of our senses faster through GUIs, multimedia- and even haptic-enabling- formats, which collectively conspire to instill in us the notion that we've entered new dimensions. That is, until the power grid takes a sustained hit. At that point, all bets are off.
FAC |
