Wireless technology is where the world is heading. In some ways, it’s already there. Witness the prevalence of cell phones. They have become so ubiquitous in the developed world that many people don’t even bother to keep a home phone line now. They just keep their cell phone with them wherever they go. With smart phones, it’s now possible to take what is essentially a computer with you in your pocket wherever you go, and with WiFi and the powerful cellular networks now available, you can get on the Internet and do pretty nearly everything you used to do on your desktop computer, from the comfort of your…phone? Well, so it’s not very comfortable, yet, but it is convenient, and that is the future.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine a world not too long from now where people don’t even own personal computers they keep at home anymore or bother to lug around laptops or netbooks, because their phones do everything and do it wirelessly. The freedom granted by cutting the cord cannot be overstated. Even at home in current times, many people now use wireless routers to broadcast their Internet signal throughout the house, so that it’s no longer necessary to connect an Ethernet cable (or, dare it be said, a modem cable) to the computer in order to get on the Web. This trend will only continue. With wireless synchronization, it may not be long before everything running on electricity is connected through the Internet and the world of the future suddenly is arrived.
The one thing still remaining stubbornly wired is electricity, and even that may be changing. There have been recent demonstrations of a wireless electricity technology, at range quite limited of course, and that’s really the first pebble to drop in an inevitable rock-slide of technological innovation that will eventually bury wired electricity. It may be a dream now, but in five or ten years, who knows?