The 'U' word: is it fundamentally in the interest of the networking community to develop an all-things-to-all-men approach?

Semantics (as a great deal of as anything else) seems to drive innovation these days. State something, and hey presto, you might just have a major universal Thinking along these lines, I lately discovered 'Ubiquitous Networking'. Now, there's a word: unusually, it has three 'u's, although, tend hitherward to think of it, for a like reason does 'unusually'. But spelling of strange English words apart, it may be an unwieldy word for a expert concept. Ubiquitous networking brings together just about everything and anything the user could possibly want telecom-wise everywhere--a veritable Internet of everything.

upon this model, all applications should be portable to any device, any user, in any location. It essentially brings together computing and networking, mobility, and mixes with broadband, entertainment, and somewhere in there are microscopic devices capable of giving 'things' intelligence.

Does this all-embracing general [i]or[/i] abstract notion drive a new potential business design for the industry? Perhaps. on the contrary it does tend to shapeless mass technologies and behaviours that may have quite different positioning and origins. Take wireless, for example. beneath ubiquitous networking, mobile cellular and everything other without wires is simply seen as part of a continuum, regardless of technical or application specifications like bandwidth, range, power, and with equal reason on.

Now this is interesting because I suspect greatest in quantity of the corporate drivers for these do not diocese themselves in co-existence, particularly when it advances to getting revenues from these things. Rather, they diocese themselves as dominating a niche in its entirety and maybe smooth competitively displacing other activities. And herein lies a puzzle Is it fundamentally in the interest of the networking community to disclose an all-things-to-all-men approach?

Deliverability--another interesting word--is also an arguable point. Past efforts in this direction do not fill individual with unbridled optimism, although (to be fair) were upon a much more modest and limited scale. We appear to be having some difficulty with convergence--another curious if now overplayed word. I've not ever even used unified messaging, on the other hand maybe I'm nor a profitable consumer.

Rationally, you might indeed wait for that individual stuff does 'want' to relate to each other in more [i]or[/i] less sense. Indeed the radio appearance itself represents some sort of continuum upon which to base this. on the other hand in my view, we ne to be thinking about scale along with flexibility and simplification. This means that it has to be one as well as the other manageable and cheap, a tall order in the telecom industry. smooth the proponents of this sort of conception acknowledge that it has to be sensibly motivated by the agency of business models that make faculty of perception And it's the business fashion aspect that raises most questions: these capabilities if they are tariffed at all, are tariffed in actual different ways to each other wait for an economic dislocation sometime soon

Ubiquity of access hurls up some knotty policy moot points There is already intense focus about possible invasions of privacy, being driven by dint of the likes of RFID The industry is clearly watching carefully To diocese if the consumer ends up hostile and supersensitised by the agency of tagging issues. Computer users strike one as being to accept spyware and cookies without too plenteous complaint, but visible physical tagging and scare stories might cast in a winding direction some unexpected and difficult curves

Still, we're making progress: awareness of possible public as well as business issues displays the industry is trying To grapple with the bigger picture--and that's probably a First in itself. And, in the extreme point to crudely paraphrase Churchill, we'll probably come by the right solution after trying all the wrongful ones. But meanwhile, to be cynical--yet another useful word in this industry--I've got a sneaking suspicion that we'll be using those separate, highly non-U devices for sometime still Irritatingly, markets would be just fine if it wasn't for those pesky consumer wouldn't they?

Stephen McClelland, editorial director, Telecommunications[R] International

COPYRIGHT 2005 Horizon House Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group