What the young developers are assuming
Today I heard a 19-year-old developer say that when he talks to his friends they all assume that cable and DSL broadband access will be irrelevant. He mentioned the $100 laptop and mesh networking, and said that his developer buddies are confident that no one will use traditional networks in a few years. Instead, we'll just pop open our machines, find someone to connect to, and we'll be done. So he and his developer friends are writing applications to suit that world.
That's a great vision, and it very well may come true. But there are some counter-indications. If cities manage to create healthy municipal networks, then why would people living there go through the pain of developing adequate meshes? If all network access points have to be CALEA-compliant, then won't we be in a Prohibition-era-style time of law enforcement hunting out meshes and squashing them? (Maybe that'll just help their growth.) Will we learn how to participate in mesh networks in time to adopt them in large numbers before they become illegal?
Anyway, it was a fine moment. “Why are you guys spending so much time talking about wires and cable?”, he was saying. “We don't even think about that stuff.”
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There is absolutely no reason to assume that wires will go away. For the last 5 to 10 yards to your device, yes, maybe. But further away? No way. Omni-directional wireless is a shared medium. If you need to share the maximum bandwidth together with others, it will mean that with each addition you will have to share with the others. It gets worse, because you also need to share with the uplinks as well. So with a couple of nodes 54mbits will drop down dramatically with the amount of peers. A very good explanation is given by the CTO of Meshdynamics in the following post:
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/40180
So the way to go is from the bottom up… Build a broadband-network to every house and allow a wireless network to span from those houses to the outside world. This instead from the other way round, from the outside world into the house. Now if all ISP's would implement the 802.1X protocol like the academics are doing through Eduroam (www.eduroam.org), we would have nationwide roaming within notime especially if roaming across multiple ISP's is allowed.
The great thing of implementing 802.1X over wifi networks is also that the networks would be able to remain CALEA-compliant. So Uncle Sam would remain happy.
Young peoples enthousiasm is great, but only after they've read Computer Networks by Andy Tanenbaum.