Adobe’s recent news about the Flash Player 10.1 ( FP101 ) being optimized for mobile phones got me to thinking about the mobile space. It seems to me that the thing that sucks the most about mobile devices are the networks. Their service plans are almost extortion. No, it is exactly extortion and we put up with it.
Right now we are caught in a suck-cycle of all these incompatible networks constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest coverage/speed they can manage. And we are paying huge amounts of money each month to support this massive amount of infrastructure that is continually being upgraded. It’s sort a never ending project like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
And it just keeps getting worse because the demand for bandwidth/services and the advances in hardware are both growing exponentially. But the networks are physically so big and expansive that upgrading is becoming ever more challenging. There is a term used to describe systems that grow so large that they cannot evolve rapidly enough to keep pace with changes in the environment: extinction.
You may be thinking that’s all well and good but the networks are essential to keep our devices connected. But what if the devices themselves became the networks? As WiMax rolls out there will be more and more phones that are capable of broadcasting and receiving WiMax signals. Of course these phones will also have access to a cellular network where the owner has a subscription. Something like many phones today have with WiFi.
But at some point when the density of these devices reaches a critical level it seems like they would be capable of transmitting signals through each other to the end destination instead of using some central network. It would be a mashup of peer-2-peer with WiMax where each device performs the role of DNS server and router. And it’s not just cellphones that would be contributing to the network. Every device equipped with a WiMax receiver/transmitter could become a small network tower: cars, home networks, traffic cams, networked appliances, etc.
Note: I’m assuming that as technology evolves WiMax chips will become cheap enough to embed in anything from a toaster to a treadmill and that power consumptions will drop off while miniature batteries improve. Actually, that isn’t an assumption. It’s a given. It’s only a matter of how much and how fast.
This leads me back to the FP101 which has all of the components in place to make this happen. FP101 can write data to the local device and it has P2P capabilities that have already been used to create an edge network. ( read ars technica: CNN P2P video streaming tech raises questions. ) The Octoshape Grid Delivery – using the Flash Player – that CNN is using has put a big crunch on ISPs because it drastically increases the average users amount of uploaded data. But this same approach could be used for a network of devices communicating via a WiMax network with no physical infrastructure other than the devices themselves.
This could be similar to the Flash Player adding video playback capabilities in version 6 back in 2002. Nothing much was made of it for about 3 years. Then this site called youTube.com came along and all the sudden video playback in the Flash Player became a game changer. Could it happen again with P2P?
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