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Bits and Bytes August 26, 2009
By Gregory M. Peiguss
The Last Mile Many of you have been reading in
the newspapers lately about fiber optic projects either under way or in
development in Northwest Indiana and across the state. Well, what
does all of this mean to you and me? Organizations, such as
service providers are inching closer and closer to providing extremely
high bandwidth solutions to our homes and businesses’ doorsteps. As the core infrastructure,
“highways” of high bandwidth continue to grow and expand; it attracts
businesses and creates opportunities for consumers. These
opportunities include leveraging cutting edge technologies such as Voice
over IP, cloud computing, high speed information sharing, etc… Think of the Last Mile as the
final link between the high speed, high capacity, backbones that
currently zigzag through our area. These backbones
serve such functions as carrying our telephone calls across the United
States and world and moving our data to and from our PC’s and Servers.
Plugging directly into that backbone is the Last Mile. Some Internet Service Providers
have moved in this direction already and are delivering very high speed
internet services to our homes and businesses already. Cable and
telephone providers can now offer bundled services to their customer
base. The “converging” of services such as television, telephone,
and internet would not have been possible just a couple of years ago.
By leveraging the infrastructure they have built; service providers can
offer these packages at a fairly reasonable price. In the future all of your
services will be delivered via a single connection to your home.
The need for having separate bills for your television, telephone, and
internet are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Even further
down the road, most of your appliances, will be “plugged in”. Your
smart home will be able to manage itself, send you alerts when something
is not right, or even take corrective action. You’ll be able to
turn lights on and off, check the inventory of milk in your
refrigerator, and even tell it to order more for you when it gets low. These are just some examples of
what is possible and what will be the future when your world is plugged
in, and it’s closer than you think. We are living in an exciting
time as the internet continues to grow. New ideas continue to
foster innovation. Through innovation new businesses are formed
and with our infrastructure in place; Northwest Indiana will continue to
grow and detach its self from relics of the past.
You can e-mail me at anytime at g@219.com
Gregory M. Peiguss
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