Tech Prognostication - Do Any Consultant Firms Get It Right?

Over the years I’ve been involved with any form of technology, one thing I can say is that most prediction of trends in any of the sectors of tech are wrong. Either the idea never takes off or the time frame is all wrong in the prediction.

Very early this morning, I happened to read a review of three 802.11n routers. The routers were all well-known brands, and for the purpose of this review, it doesn’t matter which was the best. What is important is that the products were either barely better than 802.11g pieces or worse. These are not beta products - they are already selling. In each case, the performance was compared by using an ethernet card adapter from the same maker. This puts each company on an even footing, and chipset differences are eliminated.

Now for the point of this article - later I read an article concerning an idea put forth by the Burton Group (Does everyone have a group? And why do we rarely hear of a group more than once in our lives?)

The idea put forth is that wired ethernet  is on the way out. Perhaps. The outlandish part of the claim is that 802.11n is what is going to supplant it.

If that is the case, I certainly hope everyone plans to move closer together than they are now. You see the 802.11n routers that were faster than the 11g control units were only faster at distances of 2 feet or less. When I read this part of the report I almost fell down. Who networks things, other than printers, wirelessly at distances of 2 feet or less?

Given that no reviews of any wireless product have significantly bested fast ethernet, at any distance, or through walls, and that no one wants backwards progress - we all are accustomed to things becoming faster - why should computer to computer communications get slower?

Are buildings for business suddenly going to be made completely open inside, with absolutely no walls? Although that might be a possibility, the problems don’t stop there. All the 802.11n subjects degraded significantly in open settings at distances of 35 ft. Wired ethernet doesn’t have this problem. Wired ethernet can be easily put into neat ’sections’  which limits traffic on the network in general. With 802.11n there are only a few channels, and adjacent channel usage causes slowing due to overlap interference.

This does not yet address the benefits of gigabit networking compared to fast ethernet. This puts even greater distance between the mean speed of wired and wireless networks.

Yes, every century has its own version of Nostradamus. Few seem to realize how wide the field must be in order to render any of his prognostications as true. When you pin things down to something specific, like, the removal of wired ethernet from our lives … well…

[tags] Nostradamus, Burton Group, ethernet, 802.11n, progress [/tags]