We’ve got clouds, colo’s, data centers, and re-transmitters. That’s a lot of infrastructures to manage, and its tough to have it everywhere.
Ken Dacus, former Global Network Architect of Netscape just made a prediction:
“iPhones will be connected so much they’ll run web servers.”
Thanks for that, Ken. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom in your idea.
A couple of summers ago, we noticed the large expanses out West with no wireless coverage. Because of the unmet need, we had the idea that semi-trucks fitted with transceivers could dynamically create a giant, virtual, roaming wireless net. The truck owners could be rewarded with free usage, and the services could be resold or shared openly. Using this approach, why could you create a national domestic coverage network that could be used for wireless roaming out there in those hard to reach areas on the highways.
The idea above is not that different from how alarm companies form their radio networks already, except that in the above case, its mobile.
Getting back to alarm systems: each home alarm acts as a node and every node in the neighborhood is part of a meshed network. Every time a new alarm system is installed the network gets more robust. This makes the network difficult to disrupt, and self-reliant apart from the local telecom and wireless utilities. That’s a good feature set for something that no matter what, has to work.
Isn’t it great how ideas form one atop another? Some of them really can’t be raised unless there is an underlying need that was created by a preceding idea, and sometimes, as in the above example, you need multiple innovations that yield an entirely new result. You could call it … New thinking!
It will be interesting to see what variations of the above ideas, if any, come to fruition.