TMTOWTDI

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I am so damn excited for the future. I look at where we are today with tech, and back into the past at where we came from, and then finally at the ideas incubating in academia and industry, and chills run down my spine at the thought of where we will be in 2, 5, 10, 20 years. My favorite anticipation is of ubiquitous (read: 99% coverage over the continental U.S.), speedy Internet access.

The coolest part of this pervasive access would be that every single device could have network access. Now, I do not envision any desk lamps, microwaves, or washing machines with direct access to this network, but they could (and should!) have access via mesh networking through a gateway of some sort in the home.

The effect of this network omnipresence on media will be massively profound. Yes, the dystopian future of Epic 2015 is a distinct possibility that must be managed, but I think that through proper regulation (by both the government and the people), the advantages of ever-present access far outweigh the horrors. My favorite exception beyond simple global Internet access is the combination of that access with other services such as location through GPS. The iPhone and the Android G1 come closest today to providing the kind of access and services envisioned. Applications beyond those already available on the Internet include those that would take advantage of the built in camera and the location awareness. Viewing media on these rich-content devices will be a pleasure, but producing geotagged media on-the-go through applications that share the information quickly with your contacts and friends for everyone’s furtherance are just awesome.

There are a number of technologies currently in development that could begin the process of truly universal wireless access, including WiMAX and LTE. Both standards are designed to be able to work over a range of frequencies. A particularly valuable piece of the spectrum that companies developing and planning to deploy these standards wish to use is the 700 MHz band (also know as the UHF band). This band is extremely valuable because according to some estimates it would possibly allow for network towers with a range twice that of current cell phone towers (although frequency availability would still be an issue, but still the number of towers needed would be vastly less than is needed with the frequencies currently apportioned to cell phone providers). One other not so new but currently mostly underutilized standard is IPv6, which is needed because otherwise there would not be enough Internet Protocol addresses for every device to have one.

Please also see this alternate viewpoint on why we should fear ubiquitous Web access.