Its heading for a dead end. Sorry to say.
As in many things, its success will be its downfall. One can now scan the ISM spectrum and see a perceivable rise in the noise floor. Links that once worked will fall victim to ever increasing noise floors, and become less and less reliable. Expansion of bands will be a must, but all the good stuff will be polluted, leaving less and less frequencies to be developed at higher and higher frequencies, all with less range.
There are a few bright spots, mesh networking and software defined radios 'might' add a bit of cushion, but not forever. Better modulation schemes might help, but at the expense of antiquating the investment in the last technology.
With the FCC's current rush to destroy the 2-80 mhz bands with broadband over power lines, one can see no sane policies coming forth from them in the near future. No, in fact, policy will be dictated by bribes, graft and corruption by the corporate thugs who will simply buy whatever influence they desire.
The future does not look bright to me, and I speak from the standpoint of an RF engineer of some 30 years of experience.
This doesn't mean we should throw in the towel, and acquiesce to the possibilities. New schemes are being hatched as I type. We should endeavor to hang onto the limited resources we have in the spectrum with the tenaciousness of a pit bull. We don't know exactly what the future may bring, but we certainly will need spectrum to experiment.
At 14:44 3/18/2004, you wrote:
So where are wireless communications and data services headed? Will it become a 'neccessary' service, like the plain old phone line is now, or like electricity, or will it continue to always evolve into something 'new' and 'hot'?
To elaborate: plain old telephones and electricity are pretty much essential services. Everyone needs and has them. However, they are saturated technologies. There has been little effective improvement in their design that has impacted the common man in the recent past. Are wireless services also headed this way? If so, how soon can we observe such effects?
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