An interesting new technology trend: Internet in a suitcase!
On June 12, 2011, The New York Times reported on something novel in an article titlted “US Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors”. The first two paragraphs read:
“The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.””
This development is of course good news for people who believe in the free exchange of information, but it’s also a reminder of the power of the long-term trends in computing efficiency I’ve blogged on previously (here and here).
The research (which will be published this year in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing) shows that computations per kWh (ie energy efficiency of computation) for all types of computers has doubled roughly every year and a half since Eniac in 1946.
The big implications of these trends are for mobile computing devices, the existence of which was an inevitable outcome of these trends. Doubling of computing efficiency every year and a half means a factor of 100 improvement every decade. That means that at a fixed level of computation the need for battery capacity will decrease at that rate every decade. Alternatively, you could have 20 times more computation at 5 times the battery life. And that progress implies ever greater use of mobile computing, sensors, and controls, which will allow us to better match services supplied with services demanded. It will also lead to an explosion of data the likes of which we haven’t yet experienced (we ain’t seen nothing yet!).
And it’s not right to call it “Moore’s law” (as some still do) because these trends PRECEDE Moore’s law (they hold true for tube and discrete transistor computers, not just microprocessors). In fact, they are an inherent feature of electronic information technology, as our paper shows.
The industry hasn’t fully absorbed the implications of these trends, but I think they are critically important to understanding its future. Internet in a suitcase is a nice result, but there are many other such innovations that will no doubt surprise us all in coming years.
