VoIP, convergence and everything
I don't know about you but my mail box is filled with articles like this one in NetworkWorld, spruiking the latest VoIP and Power over Ethernet gear. So what, who cares? Well I guess I'm not in the market myself but the company I work for sure is... and probably yours as well. And your home? Well I certainly use Skype, even if it's only to call my kids to dinner via their PC. The point is - wow. Look where we are.
I saw - or recognised, I should say - my first modem in 1977. It was bolted to a wall in a bank. As a bank teller I used it to magically update bank balances at phenomenal speeds. 19kbps comes to mind, but I could be exaggerating by about 10 or so kbps. In another job in 1978, I was writing client info on cards and putting them in rotating open files. Work orders were copied off using smelly volatile fluids and despatched by hand to the guys - yes guys - who did the work. And that was a Telco, may I add! A year or 2 later I saw my first fax machine. Ten years later I worked with a guy who could afford a mobile - with a battery as big as a house brick and sold my first CD-ROM drives. I saw the Internet for the first time at a university in 1989. Yes, of course it was used to look at drawings of the Starship Enterprise from some geek from afar. By 1994 I had a home page and was dialling up via modem at astonishing speeds... it was so slow it was astonishing, anyway! Everything was text.
The talk was convergence, of a single global digital highway for all communication. The naysayers, mostly pundits or corporate CEOs with vested media interests said it'll take 50 years to change the world, or 20 at best - so let's ignore it or despise it. Then the tech world exploded, money was made and lost and we all thought the digital nirvana had slipped below the horizon... it looked like the doomsaying pundits were a bit closer to reality than we had hoped.
Yet here it is, 2006, and we have quietly linked the world with wires, opened the pipes and are cheerily globalising and digitising every damned thing we can find. Even the Telcos and media moguls can't hide from the revolution that is washing over us. And the naysayers from 2000? They have quietly joined in and will happily use VoIP just like the rest of us to save bucks off their telco bills. And big corporate media has bought up big in cyberspace whilst it's still cheap - the writing's on the wall. Or more to the point, on the screen.
I saw - or recognised, I should say - my first modem in 1977. It was bolted to a wall in a bank. As a bank teller I used it to magically update bank balances at phenomenal speeds. 19kbps comes to mind, but I could be exaggerating by about 10 or so kbps. In another job in 1978, I was writing client info on cards and putting them in rotating open files. Work orders were copied off using smelly volatile fluids and despatched by hand to the guys - yes guys - who did the work. And that was a Telco, may I add! A year or 2 later I saw my first fax machine. Ten years later I worked with a guy who could afford a mobile - with a battery as big as a house brick and sold my first CD-ROM drives. I saw the Internet for the first time at a university in 1989. Yes, of course it was used to look at drawings of the Starship Enterprise from some geek from afar. By 1994 I had a home page and was dialling up via modem at astonishing speeds... it was so slow it was astonishing, anyway! Everything was text.
The talk was convergence, of a single global digital highway for all communication. The naysayers, mostly pundits or corporate CEOs with vested media interests said it'll take 50 years to change the world, or 20 at best - so let's ignore it or despise it. Then the tech world exploded, money was made and lost and we all thought the digital nirvana had slipped below the horizon... it looked like the doomsaying pundits were a bit closer to reality than we had hoped.
Yet here it is, 2006, and we have quietly linked the world with wires, opened the pipes and are cheerily globalising and digitising every damned thing we can find. Even the Telcos and media moguls can't hide from the revolution that is washing over us. And the naysayers from 2000? They have quietly joined in and will happily use VoIP just like the rest of us to save bucks off their telco bills. And big corporate media has bought up big in cyberspace whilst it's still cheap - the writing's on the wall. Or more to the point, on the screen.
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