The Future.

Ahoy,

Great class yesterday. I enjoyed our guest speaker, and I particularly appreciated that our professor and guest maintained different views with regards to the distribution of media. As you may recall, with regards to media distribution, our professor appeared to be in the more traditional camp, suggesting that users will download products to local hard drives, while the guest lecturer seemed to suggest that the future contained an "always connected" network centric view of the world (the user downloads rights on demand based on an ID etc.). The short discussion was great, and it raised a lot of questions in my walnut sized brain.

However, as a realtive neophyte in the field, I must confess that was a bit confused with regards to the differences between their views of the future, so I did a bit of research to learn about the capabilities of Wi-Fi and the other technologies our guest mentioned. If you are interested, check out: Cisco and The 802.11b Overview . These both provide a quick overview of Wi-Fi, and were useful in understanding the technology itself, especially from a capabilities perspective. After reading such articles, I came to doubt our guest speakers view of the future, especially with regards to the enabling technology (he frequently referred to a future where users are always connected to a centralized download server via Wi-Fi), and I tended to side with Professor Kagan. In my view, Wi-Fi is limited in capacity and coverage, and I doubt that the ubiquitous coverage will ever be achived. It's just too costly to deploy and backhaul the number of hot-spots required for such a solution.

However, after reading some more, I realized that we needn't constrain our discussion to one access technology or another, and I "discoverd" an emerging Wireless technology known as Wi-Max. Apparently, Wi-Max is a Wi-Fi on steroids. It has far greater range, on the order of kilometers, and greater throughput. And, importantly, it is supported by the big wireless vendors, especially those that lost out in the 3G wars that we hear so much about (i.e. Motorola). Unfortunately, it seems that the roll-out of Wi-Max has been incredibly slow, and some question it's liklihood of commercial success. Anyway, the point is that technology is emerging that will offer vastly improved "Wi-Fi like" services, and that may well enable a futre aligned with the views of our guest speaker.

Unfortunately, even if the technology does come into place, I seriously doubt that the content providers have the capacity to change models, at least in a reasonable time frame.

Does anytone out there have some insight into this? If so, please let me know your thoughts, as I would like to learn more about content rights and distribution.

Thanks in advance.
Jack