| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
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“I wouldn’t say ‘perfected,’ and I don’t know that it will be anywhere on the globe, but I mostly agree we’ll see it be much more cheaper and accessible.” —Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief, SearchEngineWatch.com
“Global political pressures from some governments will continue to prevent total, open access to some of the constituents within geographical areas. There will be fewer Third World countries, but the ones that continue to exist will receive help from other countries as they build out their infrastructure. This will probably not be totally complete within this time frame.” —Mike McCarty, chief network officer, Johns Hopkins
“Anywhere? No. Many places? Yes. Some countries will deliberately prohibit wireless Internet communications for political reasons. Others will fall behind (or remain behind) the curve because of business or government telecom monopolies trying to maintain their current cash cows at the expense of new services. Will all these things be technically possible by then? Sure. But deployment is a different issue.” —John S. Quarterman, president, InternetPerils, Inc.
“The key will be the prosumer model where people pay or are paid for content at a microbyte level with some form of economic granularity that ends up a balancing of costs for production and consumption for an individual.” —Rich Ling, senior researcher and sociologist, Telenor Research Institute, Oslo, Norway
“After 15 years, there still will be some countries where mobile communication will be unavailable due to economical or political situation. Smooth data flow still requires significant improvements across the countries and network operators in Europe. It would be silly to expect a better situation in Africa in 2020 than in Europe today.” —Wladyslaw Majewski, OSI CompuTrain SA, ISOC Polska
“The technology supporting this kind of development is proceeding at full speed. In addition, there is now a political will in a number of countries to develop electronic medical records (EMR) nationally. It is only a matter of time when EMRs would be accessible worldwide.” —Rashid Bashshur, director of telemedicine, University of Michigan