While flipping through cable
channels looking for something worth watching the other
day, I landed on a Campbell's Soup commercial. It
featured quick scenes of people using wireless high-tech
gadgets intercut with scenes of people on the go downing
Campbell's Soup at Hand with the tagline "If your whole
life is wireless, shouldn't your soup be?" Wireless soup?
What exactly does that mean? I never noticed any wires in
my soup.
I puzzled for awhile over how they
heat the soup on the go like that. Does turning the lid
somehow set off a chemical reaction that makes the soup
hot? Do they use tiny battery powered microwave ovens? Do
they just plunge the container into a convenient nearby
hot spring? Or do they not heat it all and just drink it
cold? In which case they could've had a V8!
We have seen the future and it is
wireless, well except for that ugly broadband cable
strung down the back wall of my house and in through the
basement window forcing me to keep the window open a
crack all winter, which Comcast refuses to fix even
though it was their technician deliberately ran the cable
in through a broken window to save himself drilling a
hole in the brick wall. When I got the broken window
fixed, the window guy had to disconnect the cable, open
the window, run it out and reconnect it.
Wireless-shmireless.
Speaking of wirelessness and non
sequiturs in the media, I was listening to the BBC news
on my local NPR station in the middle of the night and
heard Jeremy
Wagstaff's commentary on
VoIP. Somehow hearing someone talking about packet
switching versus circuit switching on the radio in the
middle of the night made me feel slightly less marginal.
OK, so he didn't mention fax over IP, which is what makes
my family's eyes glaze over when they ask me about work
during family gatherings, but still, it gives me the
feeling that finally after 30 years of being so far ahead
of the curve that any shop talk I might make at the table
was incomprehensible I'm now enough behind the
curve to fit in with the main stream.
Of course, my brain is now so
thoroughly addled by aging and repeated burnout and
information overload that I didn't quite grasp how the
fact that people have ditched their landlines and
switched to cellphones made for improved VoIP
connections. Wagstaff quotes Andy
Abramson: "a lot of people
(at least in North America) have ditched their landline
telephones for cellphones. This means people are ready
for other ways to make phone calls." I can see how that
makes for more acceptance of different phone technology
but how does it make the quality of VoIP calls better? I
think they missed a step in the transition from VoIP
phones that plug into the USB port on your computer to
wireless VoIP phones (VOW)
becoming as common as cellphones. WiFi is gonna have to
become way more ubiquitous and/or there's gonna
hafta be a new wireless broadband Internet technology to
support all those teenagers yakking on mobile phones and
IM'ing them at the same time.
Come to think of it, just a couple
weeks ago I heard, also on the BBC news I believe, though
it might have been on some NPR show, that only 57% of
Americans have mobile phones. That seemed astoundingly
low (or mayber it was 67% -- still low) given how
everybody I see in the course of the day seems to be
talking on one. I think the penetration is much higher in
China. Even four years ago when I was there it seemed
like all Chinese must be issued cellphones at birth. Even
homeless people had them. I can only imagine they're even
more common there now. Of course, I was in big cities:
Beijing, Chengdu, Lhasa. I don't know about the rural
areas. Do they have cellphone dead spots in the rural
areas like we do here in Massachusetts? I mean there's
been a deadspot in Groton for 20 years. Actually my old
Motorola bag phone thru Cellular One worked once or twice
on the Groton/Ayer line but not routinely. Verizon has
slightly better coverage but it still disappears in parts
of Groton, Littleton, Harvard, and even, somewhat
ironically, Acton that former home of zillions of
networking and telecom startups.
So here I am musing on wireless
soup over IP on New Year's Eve instead of reflecting on
the year just past. But I already mentioned in my
Thanksgiving
entry that here in the
embedded life in the bluest blue state this year meant
that the Ex-Pat returned from the non-peace zone, the Red
Sox won the World Series, and the Beach Boys are one
among many gay couples now legally married in the eyes of
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It's been one heckuva
year!
[After I wrote this entry
I saw an ad for a cellular to VoIP bridging device. So
that would make the jump from ubiquitous cellular to
ubiquitous VoIP more comprehensible. Maybe I'm falling
further behind than I thought, not knowing such a device
existed.]
