After a weekend of watching movies and TV, I  started thinking about how great it would be great if some tech and comm giants such as Comcast, Vonage, Linksys, Microsoft, and Intel got together and created some kind of superbox that could sit in your living room and handle Cable, DVR, HDTV, Ethernet, Wireless, VoIP, and DVDs? There's a plenty of other cool features that can be added to this vision, but what’s important to me is the consolidation of these things we have currently have several units and remotes for into 1 box. All you need is printer/scanner/copier/fax to go along and you've got a more than adequate enough home office and entertainment center for the average American, which is cool. It seems that things may be ultimately headed in this direction but it will be interesting to see whether cooperation between companies or corporate takeovers which lead to final goal. Competition is good of course but this could lead to saturation, confusion, and ultimately a less powerful product which is what most non-technical people face when trying to by a digital camera or laptop for example. There are so many features that it is not clear which product is best for you. So, maybe it would be good if one group spearheaded this. I’m not an econ or business major so I’m not sure how realistic the whole idea is of in terms of how different companies will come together and share profits but I thinks it a good idea to look to the future and consider this.

            I’m also wondering what’s up with the future of VoIP and WiFi. It seems that huge entities such as cities are trying to setup large-scale solutions for their constituents. I’m not sure if local taxes will pay for this or what. But, phone and internet companies being cut out of the profit loop are furious. Will the entire nation be a huge WiFi network one day? If only security was where it needed to be and/or everyone could be trusted. Will telephone lines disappear? Slowly, I believe. We’ve got states like Florida trying to tax VoIP and countries trying to outlaw it so their telephone industry doesn’t go bankrupt. These are signs that things are definitely changing.

And what about the marriage of VoIP and WiFi? It’s still early, but there’s some work left to do here. With the way my VoIP is setup, I can only have a phone in my living room because this is where my cable outlet is which provides the internet which feeds my VoIP box. My phone is cordless and able to move around but this setup is still makes it annoying to not have a phone based in other parts of my home. Often, I can’t hear the phone in the living room over the tv, laptop, radio, or conversations going on in other rooms or I’m too lazy to get up and run to the living room to answer. I would think there would a wireless solution on store shelves by now. I hope they are not waiting for everyone to buy the wired so then they can soon sell us the wireless and make twice as much. Hopefully, we don’t have to reinvent the phone here but something could be done. We just need to solve these little issues which will clean up everyone’s living room or den and then we can move on to a more important issues like WiFi teleportation over IP. By the time this service is ready, Longhorn servers will be ready to store a copy of you while you're body is in mid-teleport.

 

Stan