I think different technologies will be used as needed for different applications. Here's my prediction for various technologies:
fiber optics -- will be used for very high capacity backbones, like the FLAG fiber optic link around the world. I also think fiber will get used in high speed MANs (metropolitan area networks) by corporations that can afford to pay for them.
cable modem -- probably will continue to be used, although it has problems when many people share the same cable segment (your packets collide with others, like on an Ethernet, requiring retransmission)
xDSL -- can give at least T-1 (1.544 Mbps) speeds over existing copper phone wires. The phone companies are aggressively pursuing this technology, which requires changes at the central office, because they can increase the bandwidth available to users, without having the expense of replacing all the copper wiring.
CDMA & other digital radio methods -- this already being used in new digital cellular phones. An interesting technology being used in the developing world is wireless local loop, where foreign phone companies give people phone service by sending a digital signal over the airwaves between homes and a central office, instead of running copper wiring.
low earth orbit satellites -- a concept with a lot of potential, but when the first projects like Iridium come online, people are not going to like the costs. For example, Iridium might charge 3 dollars a minute to make cellular phone calls over the satellite from anywhere in the world. This situation should improve as other projects start providing competition. This technology has a lot of potential in the future -- I attended a technical conference sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) back in 1995, and they talked about research they had funded under programs like CAMEO. DARPA is the agency who sponsored the original research that created ARPAnet, which is now known as the Internet, and they had done some very advanced work in this area.
As far as IAS and DWM go, I don't see any future there. I don't believe that DWM will work as claimed over unmodified copper phone lines. DWM may now be pushed for wireless use, but there are already commercially deployed modulation methods that work and are more efficient for real world use. IAS has been in business for years, and still they have no commercial products that people can buy. (It is almost 2 years since the failed demo of DWM.) High technology moves at a rapid pace and IAS is being left behind. I think the recent price rise is just hype, possibly from the market maker.
I haven't really looked at too many individual companies lately, from a stock point of view, although I should probably do so.
Paul M. |
