Ubiquity Breeds Utility

*Everything* is just an app. A computer is an universal machine. When there's a way of coding for odors, we'll have odors on the Internet...

Thanks for a thought-provoking post. I wanted to add more regarding whether the money for startups is for serving enterprises or customers. A university campus is perhaps an ideal place for doing this sort of experimentation, because costs can be centralized and the decision to pay for it can be made on the organizational level, not on the individual level. No doubt Princeton students are loving their ubiquity. But if they were given the choice of paying for their share of the rollout costs or opting out and saving the money, some might decide it's not worth it. (Obviously the costs will only shrink each year, so this is just a short-term problem.)

Another point is that for wireless ubiquity to be seriously useful you need to have geographical habits that match the need. You'd be hard-pressed to find a group of people who could use wireless more than students. Their lives are tremendously ad-hoc. They're in new classes every semester; forming new study groups and common interest groups all the time; constantly roving in flocks from dorm to classroom to library to dining hall.

Enterprises might have more money to pay for this, but they probably need it less. Most office workers spend most of their time working at the same desk. When they do go elsewhere for work it's usually one of a few conference rooms. (The museum where I currently work, which doesn't have wireless, has two conference rooms for about 30 employees -- that's probably a typical ratio.)

It's also worth noting that in many office cultures, the issue of physical space is fraught with all sorts of political implications -- contrast the prestige of being a senior partner with a corner office on the top floor, vs. being a maintenance worker with a windowless office in the basement. When organizations try to move towards an environment with less fixed use of space, the organizational culture doesn't always welcome the change. There was a great article a few years back in Wired, talking about the disastrous efforts to make ad agency Chiat/Day fully mobile. Everyone was given a laptop and forbidden to have a private desk. However, there were lots of little meeting rooms, and people started taking up day-long residence in them, claiming them as offices. Some employees even forced their assistants to get to the office early in the morning so they could make sure to get an office every day -- sort of an occupational landgrab.

(And one more thing: If you have bad RSI like me, you're halfway desk-bound anyway since laptop keyboards can be really crummy, and there's no way I'm carrying around my Kinesis all day.)

None of which necessarily proves or disproves your point. I'm more interested in seeing the future than anything else, and I'd love to work at a company with full wireless to see how people use the stuff ...

Francis,

Thanks for a cogent and detailed post. Regarding campus environments, you are correct in that they are highly artificial, and students have more free-floating ad-hoc lives than most office workers. However, if anything, I found at the conference that University CIOs were even more cost-sensitive than enterprise CIOs. The good news is that the Dartmouth experiment is relatively cheap. They did most of it with vanilla APs and saturation, and didn't require fancy configuration, deployment, or management software.

Your points also serve to reinforce that largely, wireless continues to be a consumer market rather than an enterprise one.

"Daddy, what's a desktop computer?". Hmm. There are jobs where people need to sit at a desk and look at something on a big screen. Surprisingly few though. My desktop PC basically does duty as a photoshop workstation these days, and I wouldn't dream of using my laptop for that.

But right now I'm sitting surfing and doing a bit of coding after the family have gone to bed, and the desktop is sitting on the other side of the room gathering dust while my iBook and I relax in a comfortable chair. And soon, the big high res screen and the good mouse/drawing tablet/whatever photoshop input device will just be a screen and a mouse/drawing tablet/whatever wirelessly hooked up to the same server-in-a-corner-somewhere as everything else, and won't need a "PC" to be attached to.

Thanks Naval, great post. You point out that batteries certainly must get more efficient, I agree wholeheartedly. A while back I heard rumblings that wireless power is in the works. Unfortunately I can't find any info on it. I believe the way it was going to work was similar to 802.11 wireless inasmuch as there was a concept of AP. Until then Rafe Needleman has a few alternatives listed here, http://www.catchoday.com/archives/207.html

Richard,

Although wireless power would be nice in theory, I'm not sure that miniature lightning strikes are the best way to power mobile devices. Interestingly enough, our topic of discussion here is basically radio, which was accidentally invented by Nikolai Tesla when he attempted to build a wireless power transmission system - so efforts for wireless power actually predate radio!

The closest thing that I have seen to mobile power is a foldable surface that can recharge any compliant device placed on it. A number of startups are working on it, so expect to see a tabletop universal charging surface sometime in the next few years...

"hearing aid form factor" ?

I want a Star Trek badge!

I'll add an observation to your amazing post....

The Next Andreesen? - Given the passion Dartmouth and it's student body have about technology (especially wireless), I wouldn't be surprised to see several Dartmouth led wireless startups emerging quickly. I was amazed of the ubiquity of wireless dating back to 2001. Considering those freshman MBA students have just graduated......

Note: One of the best wireless articles I've read due to the behavioral analysis.

Thank you for an interesting post.

Re. people power, I had the opportunity to meet the lead developer of a product competing with our mobile blogging service on Friday night. We've both deployed our products with competing mobile operators, they with an operator 3 times the size of 'ours'. Yet we are seeing higher sign up rates, and have actually surpassed their total number of users.

The reason: "We just designed the product like the operator wanted it", said the lead developer. We, on the other hand, designed the product for the end user. Our operator is somewhat perplexed that not a single subscriber has called their help desk about our product, despite considerable traffic going through our system.

Giving people simple to use technology to facilitate expression and communication leads to people finding new and exciting ways to express themselves and communicate.

Naval wrote: "At UCSD, students with PDAs can see each other walking around campus, projected on real time maps and offer to get together, go eat, etc.." Hitting "See each other walking around", the text that comprises the link, pulls up a PDF of a paper written by Dartmouth professor D. Kotz within which I could find no reference to students being able to see each other on their PDA's at UCSD. Is this correct?

Daniel,

Thanks for the catch - the link is fixed.

Newspapers irrelevent? While I agree that USA Today will be useless in this environment, there will always be a need for well-written, well-researched news, perhaps even more so.

Naval,

Great article.

Being in the WLAN space, I run into a lot of Universities that have had huge wireless deployments, some even larger than Dartmouth: University of Tennessee has 1200 access points, MIT about 1000, Stanford over 500, Western Michigan over 600, and the list goes on.

Universities, as well as K-12 school districts, are by far the largest adopters of this technology, but key verticals in the Enterprise markets are moving faster and faster (Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing to name a few). The biggest factor for most of these markets is the low cost of deployment versus wired connections. Talking to a major bank last week, they cited that the cost for a wired port is up to 10 times more expensive than a wireless one. As speeds increases on the wireless front I think we are not too far from a world where wireless becomes the preferred method of connecting to a network, regardless if you are using a desktop or any other type of computing device.

Love the article.
Yes it is a fact that collage students are more ad-hoc then any other people, but it is important to understand that they are getting use to this type of technology at school and it is something that they will look for when they leave school. As we all know college does not teach us much about real life, but it does teach us some of the tools, and how to use those tools, these tools we will use for the rest of our lives. If when we leave school we can not find those tools in the world, we will not know how to be productive. This generation will force their employers to adopt these new tools. It’s no different then the internet. Before we forget, colleges is where most people where introduced to the internet before it was available in every house, and it was us (the last generation) that forced our employer to adopt email, IM, blackberries and yes the internet (Google)

This article makes me wonder: when will VoIP over Wi-Fi be feasible? That is, what if I want my cell phone to be VoIP? Right now I couldn't do this, because Wi-Fi is too thinly spread. There may also be technical limitations, such as whether WiFi frequencies can penetrate through trains, thereby allowing me to talk on my cell while riding Amtrak. But I wonder: is a wireless VoIP phone feasible anytime in the near future?