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In addition, soon homes will often exceed 1TB in local storage. And this data falls into three classes:
1. Data which is private and must be secured; and for which remote secure replication will be needed.
2. Data, generally video and music, which is “rights managed” and for which service content providers must provide active accountability.
3. Data which is shared within open and closed public user groups and for which network access (usually HTTP) is needed.
All of these represent market opportunities for service providers or internet companies, but management plans for these data models have not been discussed.
One of the pathways into the home will be through the gaming console. Gaming is now a bigger business than films. Few American homes do not have a gaming console. These connect to the net today to allow networked game competition. Microsoft and Sony both plan to evolve these consoles into home controller products. What is at stake?: communication, entertainment, gaming, pervasive computing (game controller becomes house controller), medical monitoring, and home security. At the moment, these devices are not smart and have no management capabilities, but it is unlikely that these will remain unmanaged devices. Will the manufacturer/supplier develop and offer management services as these devices become critical, rather than opportunistic?
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"Gaming is now a bigger business than films. Few American homes do not have a gaming console. These connect to the net today to allow networked game competition." |
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Municipalities will become gigantic consumers of communications services. The threats of terrorism and civil unrest dominate the news, but local crimes and quicker response to accidents drive the deployment of continuous, real-time, remote monitoring devices. Cameras will be at every intersection and covering every angle of every major building. Remote recording is necessary to prevent tampering. Also homeland security is paying for new technology which can recognize everyone in the field of vision of these cameras. Oversight, requirements for convictable evidence and insurance liability will drive the real time visual monitoring of every responder – police, fire, ambulance, even the town engineers. In addition, chemical sensor networks and micro weather station networks will be deployed.
None of these services can ever be allowed to fail. All require five nines of reliability from the network, as lives will depend on these services. And they are coming fast. Homeland security provides monetary help to both large and small municipalities to deploy monitoring devices. If service providers cannot guarantee QoS for all these devices and services, then the municipalities will need to contract for or build their own networks, freezing out service providers, or at least eliminating a great deal of potential revenue.
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Gaming consoles also are demanding more and more bandwidth and connectivity to communicate actions, graphics, and voice. When it is available via IMS, QoS connections will be demanded by gamers - pushing telecom technology growth just as these gamers push PC technology forward today. Basically gaming will evolve to something that looks like the “closed user group” replacing the old private dial plans that drove Advances Intelligent Network (AIN) technology into the service provider market. However, these groups will be much more fluid, with gamers joining and leaving more rapidly than the AIN user group did. Also these groups will be international in scope connecting gaming consoles to distributed computing networks, to other consoles anywhere and everywhere in the world. Gaming manufacturers have no notion on how to manage these services as they grow. Services providers understand this problem best, but not the qualitative difference the new quantitative scope jump imposes.
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Most of these services will require wireless broadband. This means hundreds of thousands of new “poles” on which to put the wireless network transmitters/receivers – all of which must be managed. Connectivity of these poles to the larger network will be line-of-sight radio or data over electric transmission lines. The world of isolated wireless “hot spots” is supplanted by the community as one large hot spot. Provision of these municipal wireless networks is driven from the bottom up by the towns and cities. Service providers should be providing many more strategic resources to join these municipalities in partnerships. Otherwise, private municipal networks will become islands where service providers are shut out. An example of this is the Oklahoma Municipal League (OML) and its business extension, the Oklahoma Municipal Services Corporation (OMSC) along with its selected business partners. Completely independent from traditional telecom, Comport Network Services & Solutions, the Cherokee Connex,
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