IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006

eldavojohn writes "As far as technologies go, there are clear winners and clear losers. This month's IEEE Spectrum issue contains an interesting list of winners and losers from 2006. Among the winners are a new radio technology, IP phone networks & memory technologies along with ethanol from sugarcane. Among the losers are tongue vision, LEDs in clothes, a flying car and ethanol from corn."

Comments

Re:Battery Life

[deimios666]

Software in this case probably means Firmware. As discussed previously firmware is a much cheaper alternative to specialised hardware. Besides it is more flexible than hardware.

Re:Brazil in the news...

[ulzeraj]

Ethanol from CORN is a bad idea. Here we make ethanol from sugarcane.

BT chosen? Look at KPN for really moving forward

[Raindeer]

I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.

However KPN is doing something more than just changing the backbone. KPN will roll-out VDSL2+ to the end-users as well. This will all be Ethernet/IP based for the backhaul and VDSL2+ for the last 450 meters, allowing 50/20mbit down/up. KPN will close 1350 swithch locations and roll out 28000 street cabinets to deliver the speeds to the end-user.
http://www.kpn.com/upload/1215076_9475_11328305981 77-1212162_9475_1132326712652-Op_weg_naar_All-IP_1 81105.pdf
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=69 419&print=true
(the lightreading article forgets the vdsl2+ bit, see presentation for that)

In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessio n6 (minute 25 and onwards)