As promised, a key component of Telephony’s new Interactive Feature is reader participation, and I’d like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the comments our readers have made on our current I-feature topic, the future of mobility. The comments haven’t exactly been pouring in, several of them have been quite astute, though with a slightly cynical bent.
In response to Sprint’s McGuire on Frolicking in the Social Grass, a story about the interconnected world envisioned by Sprint’s startegy VP Russ McGuire, Tim responded with a detailed description of how the same technologies could be used for what is essentially cyberstalking:
I see a hot chick in line at Starbucks, so I take a picture of her on my phone and send it to the Facial Recognition App which will supposedly be useful for never forgetting the names of people… like that assistant guy that always tells the king what the name of the next subject is. But we all know [it's] really used to find out the name of cute chicks at Starbucks. So, now that we know her name, we can look her up on FaceBook or Linkdin or [whatever] and see if she has a boyfriend. At this point we could use this opportunity to find interests we have in common and try to strike up a conversation with her. However, being the social chickens we are, we will instead play an elaborate social ritual game where we try to do things to get her to notice us. … Ultimately, nothing will happen because we’ve never bothered to actually connect with her in any meaningful way … and we’ll try to find some other person with whom we can make a connection without ever really having to connect.
David replies: “Tim, Your comment is funny, sad, and true all at the same time.” Tim has a perfectly valid point: the same technologies intended to connect us to more people can, ironically, depersonalize those interactions.
A Q&A with AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vegaon AT&T’s future three-screen strategy drew a skeptical responses from a couple of readers questioning whether AT&T was really the company to the deliver the connected future. Meanwhile, Vanaja was enthusiastic about the picture de la Vega painted of an hyper-connected home centering on the mobile device, but he checked his optimism by posing a question on the security risks of such a network:
… this type of great future scenario … sounds fantastic in theory but my concern is that we might be giving more options for intellectual hackers to gather more data for their crime.
In a general response to the feature’s overall theme, Robert Duncan raised the problem of future business models for these broadband-centric networks:
… it is forecast that mobile networks will have to handle an aggregate load of 100X the current data traffic within just a few years. This creates a parallel, but overarching business problem: how to maintain profitability if marginal costs (incremental data traffic) increases 100X, but data revenues only increase 2X? The solution is system-wide cost reduction and simplification, to enable such massive increases in capacity at increasingly lower cost/bit. There is no silver bullet: one single solution, such as LTE, will not deliver 100X cost reduction in the entire value chain of data service.
Lastly one of our readers took us up on our request to describe how he envisioned wireless services in the future. From Christopher Glenn:
In 2025, I expect to get a SMS from my refrigerator that directly creates a [to-do] list item on my PDA with a deadline set to 12 hours later whenever my refrigerator’s odor sensor recognizes that the milk is going bad. I also expect the refrigerator to automatically order new lightbulbs for itself when they go out … and while I am at it, I wouldn’t mind if it had sensors in the 12-ounce can holder too that would automatically order more Cherry Diet Coke. Now if Peoria only had grocery delivery … but it will by 2025!
Thanks again for your responses. To read more about the I-feature concept, check out our introductory blog post, and to see all of the stories for this month’s topoc, Wireless in 2025, see the I-feature home page. You can comment on the home page itself or any of the stories and blog entries.