Internet Capacity- Circa 2010

By Carrisa Baptiste- Mobile Devices Consultant, Advocate Networks, LLC

It has been years since I’ve used a paper telephone book, I use yellowpages.com. Several of my friends have received their diplomas from online educational institutions. Let’s not forget my eleven year old nephew who has a cellular phone and uses the internet to connect with other players using his Sony Play station.

Wow, how amazing the internet is and the fascinating opportunities it provides to our world!

Over the next few years, blackberries and other personal data devices will be the primary source for wireless connectivity verses the traditional cellular devices. In doing so, the demand for instant and constant connectivity to the internet will increase. It is essential that we start enlarging our infrastructure to allow for additional usage on the network.

My teenage cousin is a freshman in college and utilizes the social web sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com to stay in touch with her friends around the world. These sites allow us to put information about ourselves on there, which often times include videos, songs and pictures.

So what’s the point of all this? As most of us know, all this new business activity and Gen-Y social dependency on the web places increasingly arduous demands on our network. As this trend continues, the demands on the internet increases and we need to ensure that it is scaleable.

In a recent Web 2.0 forum, Jim Cicconi, VP of Legislative Affairs for AT&T predicted that the Internet could reach its physical capacity to carry all this traffic by as early as 2010. Furthermore, he predicts a 50-fold increase in broadband traffic by 2015.

In my work with our Customers, it’s clear that the trend in enterprise wireless devices is toward more and more bandwidth consumption. This is driven not only by proliferation of affordable wireless broadband services, but also by the increasingly common web-accessibility of enterprise applications. Let’s also not forget the 500 pound gorilla in this mix- video (and her 1,000 pound daddy- HD video).

I wasn’t one of the first to engage in on-line banking, on-line shopping, surfing and online-communicating. However, I cannot imagine life without them. Organizations invest large sums of money in order to provide products and services to their customers in a timely and efficient manner. The internet is a key piece of this element, not only allowing ease of use but often times a competitive advantage. Internet delivery of services to Customers is the great enabler of B2C sales in this decade.

All this is perhaps a long-winded way of agreeing with Mr. Cicconi that the risk of Internet capacity is a problem that is critical from a variety of perspectives. Mitigation of that risk largely comes from investment by the carriers profiting from the use of the web. While there’s a demonstrated temptation to legislate the path to this risk mitigation, let’s hope that this takes a course that enables unrestricted and open use by businesses and consumers while pragmatically profitable to the service providers.

Thanks go to Carrisa Baptiste of Advocate Networks, LLC for contributing this post.

Collaboration: Email vs. Wiki

This comes by way of Espen Anderson’s blog: http://www.espen.com/archives/2008/03/email_vs_wiki.html  and (From Chris Rasmussen via Anthony Williams.

Per my earlier posts on email technology’s fit for today’s business processes, I think this diagram presents a very clear argument on its own.

 

 

Chickens and Eggs

I lead into this discussion using the well known adage that says, “Which came first- The chicken or the egg?”  Granted, it’s a bit trite, but many a glass of wine has been tossed back over discussions about cause, effect, cause.

Recent developments in physics are re-confirming what has been told by ancient metaphysics for millennia.  One such point in this regard is the notion that we create our own reality by manipulating the energy around us.  While this is a notion that is deserving of focused discussions in its own right, I will leverage this notion as an analogy for a quick comment on the development of technology. 

Let’s take communication technology for example.  Many of us can remember the emergence of Email as an application, and as a communication technology.  It really wasn’t that long ago.  It could be said that Email was the killer app of the ARPANET (remember that name?), and when we talk about ARPANET we’re covering ground in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  I believe it was 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email, and within just a couple of years Email accounted for more than 75% of traffic on ARPANET.  ‘Sound familiar?  It would seem that Email has been the cocaine that drove us to accelerated consumption of content and messaging which now consumes such a large part of our day.

For anyone reading this BLOG, it’s surely the case that for most everyone you know, Email is a fundamental part of daily life.  Not only does Business depend upon it, but we depend upon it for our personal lives as well.  With the fact that Email is securely rooted in our daily personal and professional lives, I will say too that I’m one of those people who are firmly in the camp that says Email is a technology that is struggling to be “Fit for Purpose” (to use an ITIL term) given the nature of contemporary communication processes.

So what does any of this have to do with chickens and eggs, or with creating our own realities?  To me, this is a good analogy to describe the fact that we create technologies that we need to facilitate our desired business behaviors.  That is, we are not addicted to increasing amounts and urgency of communication because Email and IM enabled it.  Rather, we need to communicate with more urgency, and collectively we’ve enabled the emergence of technologies that accommodate the state that our business behavior demands.

In a future post, I’ll share the results of my query of a number of users with the question of whether email is dead.  I was surprised by the feedback and perhaps you’ll find it interesting as well.

 

Cartoon credit: Joel Coughlin