Friday 9 September 2005

Pic of the day: Our computers are following us everywhere, and the Net is all around us.

Computers unplugged

Personal computer sales are soaring again, and portables are selling faster than desktops. The "ultra-light" portables, small lightweight notebook PCs, are seeing a particularly fast growth. And pocket PCs, which were fading for a few years due to the onslaught of advanced mobile phones, are bouncing back up. Meanwhile, those advanced mobile phones are still selling, and handheld game consoles are growing ever more common and ever more capable, with Sony's latest model (PSP) even having a built-in web browser.

One likely reason for the popularity of ultra-portable PCs is the new wave of wireless access. There are now several ways of connecting to the Internet with a portable computer by using radio waves, no cables required. These different ways are also moving toward each other.

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Bluetooth, a very local and very generic networking standard, allows computers and peripherals to talk to each other over a distance of ca 10 meters (30 feet). The short radius means they don't produce much radiation and don't need much electricity. You decide what units you want to connect to, so it is not like someone can just read your computer's secret files by walking past you. You can however set many computers and mobile phones to exchange electronic "business cards" with passing machines without pairing up.

WLAN – Wireless Local Area Network – has a greater radius, 100 meters or more unless there's steel and concrete in between, which admittedly there often is. The most common standard, ideal for private and small business use, is 802.11, available in two variants, b (older) and g (faster). The network can be set with various degrees of security. If you install one for your family, you may want to password protect it so no one else can use it; if you're running it to attract customers to your cafe, you obviously don't want that. Some neighborhoods set up wireless networks giving Internet access cheaply to many families at once, but the bandwidth is not without limit. You can't have a dozen families downloading movies at the same time, obviously. For e-mail and surfing it's plenty good enough. Place it on the roof of the highest house and there you go.

3G is short for third generation mobile phone networks. But in addition to giving your phone Internet access, it can also be used to give your computer wireless broadband (although narrower than DSL, broadband over telephone lines). A good solution for people on the move. Not all areas are covered, but more and more are.

WLAN and 3G are both expanding fairly rapidly, and it no longer seems unlikely that most people eventually will spend their lives entirely surrounded by wireless Internet. All you need is some unit that can tap into it. Such units are growing plentiful. Mobile phones, portable PCs, handheld computers, even Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) can already connect wirelessly. While you are sitting in a car (please don't do this while driving) or at a restaurant, in your garden or in the shade of a tree on the hills overlooking your town ... the Internet is there around you, like a technological travesty of the Great Spirit, ever ready to speak to you if you open up, ever ready to shape you into its own image.

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Phones and mobile phones and IP telephony converge and become one. Radio, podcasting, and MP3 players also converge to let you listen to whatever you want wherever you want. Movies require more bandwidth but we are moving in that direction. Text messages or email? You send whichever you want and your friends and family receive them on whatever medium happens to be closest to them. All this is happening right in front of us. In some countries it has come further (Korea, Japan and Scandinavia), but the rich world is sure to follow suit quickly. The developing world may bypass the phase of wire entirely, saving enormous sums on cables.

What effect the omnipresent Net will have on our culture, is still an open question. Some fear that we will get a gray mass-produced world culture made in Hollywood. Others think that wars will finally come to an end when people all over the world live in a shared reality, talk together and play together as neighbors. If you move from Charleston to Okinawa, you will still have the same phone number and the same email and the same homepage. The world will finally be one. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, those who live shall find out for sure.