Wireless 2025: A look at wireless in the year 2025

A decade and a half ago, the transition from analog to digital cellular created an explosion in wireless services. What started as an expensive service for a privileged few blossomed into a global industry, which today counts 4 billion subscribers worldwide. Wireless connections overtook wireline ones. For many people in developing countries, the mobile device became their first phone and their first means of accessing the Internet.

Today we're witnessing a new revolution in which wireless has come to signify data services as much as voice. Over the next two years, the first 4G networks will emerge, pairing mobility with true broadband for the first time. The handset has begun to evolve from a mere phone into a miniature multimedia computer, and portable and mobile devices with no voice capabilities to speak of have started connecting to the wide-area cellular network.

So what's in store for the next 15 years? Will the industry undergo another fundamental shift in its landscape? Yes and no. The great leap forward to mobility — the uprooting of services and technology that once were confined to a specific place — already has become a given. The expectation is that every new application, every new service will now have — or will soon have — some kind of mobile component. Wireline voice connections are giving way to wireless, fewer and fewer computers are connected to networks via cords, and the Apple iPhone's Safari browser already has begun to handle a noticeable percentage of the world's Web browsing activity. Mobility's already out of the bag.

Those trends will continue, of course. Networks will get faster, phones will get smarter and radio connections will reach a multitude of different devices. The next revolution won't be about mobility per se, but it will use mobility to create unimaginable scale and depth in the networks of the future. The mobile operators of 2025 won't be counting their subscribers in millions, but managing individual connections numbering in the billions. Any device or object with active electronics — and many without — will be capable of transmitting a wireless signal, communicating not just with the wide-area cellular network, but with multiple local and personal area networks, and often directly with one another. While device interfaces will evolve, a good deal of the traffic and transactions on the mobile networks will be between machines. Billions of sensors will flash data across networks, triggering countless numbers of interactions, most of which customers will have only a vague awareness of.

Devices will not only connect to the network, but interconnect directly with hundreds of different devices in the home, office, car and public space — some computing devices in their own right, others ordinary household objects. Wireless won't just be a means of accessing the Internet. It will coax the Internet from the virtual world into the real one.

SOCIAL GRASS

Russ McGuire, vice president of corporate strategy for Sprint, wrote a book called The Power of Mobility, the central premise of which is that the value of any object, application or idea increases relative to its mobility. The principle can be applied to almost any scenario: A famous work of art that is moved from one museum to another can be viewed by more people, thus increasing its aesthetic value to the whole world. A computer, a phone, even a business becomes more useful the less it is physically constrained.