The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Being a teacher of junior high kids, I can tell you quite honestly that I always look forward with a sense of desperate urgency to July rolling around on my calendar. As May fades into June, I always find myself counting days until I can head out somewhere with my family and my camper and find new things to see. This year is no different. Leaving Snow Lake on the last day of school we have spent some time in Saskatoon and now have been in Edmonton for the best part of a week. Last summer I was amazed as I traveled around at the number of places that I could get online with my laptop. Even from the middle of campgrounds, I could sit in my camper and surf. The same is true for this year. Several campgrounds have been advertising free wireless highspeed service and of course I've been taking them up on their offer to stay connected and caught up with my e-mail. I'm not quite at the same level of expectation with campgrounds as I am with hotels where I basically demand service if I am going to stay there, but I will be within several years. As I travel through Western Canada (we are headed to Drumheller and the Cypress Hills from here), I've been spending some time thinking about wireless service being everywhere and wondering how things will change when that happens. For, make little mistake, in the next ten years, an explosion of wireless service will take place and you will be able to get online from most anyplace you are. It hasn't occurred in Canada yet, but in several cities in the U.S., they are beginning to consider Internet service to be infrastructure, as basic as power and water supplies. Several cities are looking at setting up free wireless canopies that will cover the entire city so that no matter where you are, you will be able to get online. Probably the first city to go this way will be San Francisco, as they are currently working on a deal with Google, but Philadelphia and Boston may not be far behind. So how will things change? The most obvious will be with access to information. If you can get that piece of information you need wherever you are, whenever you need it, why would you bother to memorize anything? From movie listings, to news, to the date of that historical battle you are looking for, when you have a library at your finger tips, why bother memorizing? Second is that the devices themselves will change. I have written before about how laptops are now everywhere, no longer being the tool of only the rich and the powerful. With wireless service everywhere, the devices will continue to change. They will grow smaller, more powerful, and will last for much longer. Microsoft is on the right track with the small devices they have codenamed Origami, but they still have some work to do. If we want to carry around our Skype phones, our e-mail, our music, videos, movies, and photos all on one device which is connected no matter where we are, they better be able to do all of these things at a moments notice, and last at least all day. I do not want to carry around this device only to have it die on me in the middle of the afternoon. I believe that small powerful devices that fit in our pockets will do for most of our activities and that the Internet will become much more of an invisible network of information, one which we will step onto and off again as we need it. Fifteen seconds to find an address, 30 seconds to buy a song, and another 30 to track down the name of a dealership nearby who will change the tires on our car. We will use it as we need it, instead of sitting down to surf for several hours and see what is new, we will be on again and off again throughout the day. A web of information available to us when we need it, instead of being a place we got to, it will be with us as we go. More and more places are advertising wireless service as a selling factor. Whether they be hotels, campgrounds, coffee shops, or restaurants. An organization to watch is one called Fon, which has acquired millions of dollars in funding to simply buy wireless routers for businesses and individuals to place in their homes. Being a member of Fon (by opening up their router to the public) will allow people access to other Fon routers no matter where they are in the world. By being a node, allowing other people to get online from your space, you will be able to access everyone else's space. A very simple but very powerful idea for setting up wireless canopies throughout populated areas. Places like Flin Flon, The Pas, Thompson, and Snow Lake should be looking at this idea. It may change what people think is possible. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
