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Disruptive Technologies For Next 5 Years

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the gazing-into-the-future dept.

prostoalex writes "America's Network magazine, the publication serving to telecom industry, takes a look at the disruptive technologies over the next five years. Disruptive, naturally, for telecom industry. Virtual keyboards, DWDM, broadband connections using powerlines, wearable computers, free-space optics, low-power devices, UltraWideBand, voice over 802.11b and numerous others are discussed, as well as their potential for development over the next five years."

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. still using the good ol' phone by unterderbrucke · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Virtual keyboards, DWDM, broadband connections using powerlines, wearable computers, free-space optics, low-power devices, UltraWideBand, voice over 802.11b"

    anyways, back to all these technologies being overkill...

  2. Except that some of these are already dead by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Except that some of these "disruptive" technologies are already dead.

    Powerline networking. It's sort of like one of those bad movie monsters that you just can't kill. Every few years, another sequel. It has tremendous promise if you can just work out those little technical problems. But you can't. Too much noise, and they radiate, and have all sorts of reactances along the way to mess up your signal with attenuation and reflections. The best proposal for powerline networking I've seen has been to use long-distance power lines to duct microwave transmissions. But that's not broadband to the home, it's a cheap backbone with medium speed, and imagine how much better it would work if they just put a fiber along the same right-of-way.

    Ultra wideband for low power, local devices is going to lose because the other transports for those devices, like bluetooth and 802.11, won't be more expensive and have fewer problems. Maybe UWB will have a few uses, but it's not going to be a big deal.

    Virtual keyboards?!?! Disruptive, right.

    Folks, take all of this with a big grain of salt.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:Except that some of these are already dead by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Insightful
      No, I am familiar with UWB. I am just not drinking the UWB kool-aid. The price of UWB vs. more conventional spread-spectrum wireless equipment is dependent on how much of the communications system you can pack into a single, inexpensive integrated circuit. At some point both systems converge on a sub-$1 component. We're very close to that point for bluetooth, and we don't have similar UWB components ready for use in consumer devices.

      Power utilization improvement vs. bluetooth isn't very convincing.

      Regarding 802.11a, when you arrive at the right trade off of power vs. bandwidth vs. processing gain vs. range, I'm not convinced that you will be able to demonstrate tremendously better power utilization in practice vs. a spread-spectrum system with similar characteristics.

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  3. Not PLC again by mobileone · · Score: 2, Insightful

    just plug in using a PLC adapter and you're ready to go.
    Come on. Power companies have talked about this for years. Everybody has had their trials.
    When you work out the business case it turns out that a radio modem is cheaper to produce and install than a PLC modem.
    Also electricity wires are terribly bad as communication media, with very low channel capacity (just ask Shannon). You can not transmit through transformers, or even between phases in multiphase installations.