Where’s my ubiquitous network?

It was several years ago — eight, to be precise — that I first mused about Internet access “dripping from the air like mist” or some other awkwardly poetic metaphor in the now-deceased eBusiness Journal. Heady days, huh?

The Ubiquitous Network (you can actually hear people pronounce the capitals) was much in evidence on the agenda at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. MWC seemed to be about one thing — mobile broadband — and the fascinating applications it will enable, the boost to quality of life it will provide in developing countries, the ultra-cool devices we’ll be using. Mobile broadband is the cornerstone of the ubiquitous network.

There’s more to it than simply the geographic coverage. Consistency of experience, transparent billing and seamlessness all enter the equation.

Please, bring on the ubiquity.

IT World Canada blogs

Check out the Mobile World Congress experience in Barcelona in our IT World Canada blog.

My Barcelona experience surely wasn’t testimony to ubiquity, even though Europe is a leader in wireless technology. My loaner wireless phone (since my personal CDMA model doesn’t work in Europe) didn’t work at all, then worked sporadically, according to some kind of unrevealed internal logic. Wi-Fi (Europeans pronounce it “whiffy”) access in my hotel room was abysmal, forcing me into the lobby to work in the evenings. (Yeah, I know: Stop whining. You got to go to Barcelona.)

Sol Trujillo, CEO of Telstra, the Australian carrier, outlined the company’s $2-billion investment in broadband infrastructure, blanketing 98 per cent of the country in HSPA access at 7Mbps — faster than most residential wired high-speed access here — targeting 42Mbps by 2010. Not broadband enough? It’s also LTE-ready. That, my friends, is broadband access hanging in the air like fog, or whatever it was I wrote in 2000. We’ll see it a few years down the road.

Not soon enough for me.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Dave Webb
Dave Webb
Dave Webb is a freelance editor and writer. A veteran journalist of more than 20 years' experience (15 of them in technology), he has held senior editorial positions with a number of technology publications. He was honoured with an Andersen Consulting Award for Excellence in Business Journalism in 2000, and several Canadian Online Publishing Awards as part of the ComputerWorld Canada team.

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