Understanding networks
Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is a technologist, philosopher and artist whose unique ability to tell tech stories in beautiful words fires the enthusiasm of his audience. He brought virtual reality to the world wide web with VRML, wrote a bestselling book called "The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination", and for the last few years has helped to transport film and television into the interactive era. Right now he is in Sydney teaching Interactive Media at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Pesce, who has been a computational apostle for almost 20 years, lately converted to the philosophy of wireless. In receiver, he tells us why wireless networking reigns supreme.
 
 
 
We carry our mobiles around with us everywhere. They have become the one indispensable 21st century item. At a pinch we can do without everything else - money, keys, etc - because we can use our mobile to call a friend to borrow some money to pay a locksmith to let us back into our flat. They are our point of connection into the human universe, near or far. Yet we tend to think of them as limited to voice and text - which is to say, human-to-human communication. Given that the mobile is, first and foremost, a telephone, this is understandable. But mobiles themselves have grown far beyond this.

A generation ago, when computer networks, then in their infancy, began to inspire forward-looking individuals, we heard the first predictions of a time when everyone, everywhere, would be pervasively linked up, always-on, in a giant global network. A decade ago the tsunami of the web washed over the world, and, in its wake, some six hundred million people - mostly in the Western world - acquired access to the internet, either through broadband access in the office, dial-up access at home, or through an uncountable number of internet cafes everywhere from Timbuktu to Ulaanbaatar.

Yet, even faster than the planet wired itself up, it grew a second, unwired soul. Nations lacking a comprehensive infrastructure for telecommunications (which requires highly reliable electrical distribution networks along with millions of telephone poles to carry the signals) leap-frogged over 20th century models of development and went directly to a pervasive wireless infrastructure. In 2005, few places on the planet remain outside the range of some sort of mobile network. Two billion people have a mobile phone service - far more than the number of those who have regular access to the internet. But that's a bit of a misstatement. Most of the newer networks, whether installed in Belgium or Botswana, are 2.5G GPRS networks. GPRS is a data network, which means it connects seamlessly to other data networks such as the internet. And this means that nearly everyone walking around with a mobile handset has instantly available, always-on access to the internet.

We've entered the era of ubiquitous networking - the great dream of a generation ago - and no one even noticed. This is a huge thing; we now have two billion individuals who are wired in (or rather, unwired in) to a whole, planet-spanning network. The question is no longer, "How do we create this global network?" but rather, "What do we do with it?" For this question, everyone has answers. But before we get caught up in a battle of ideas, we should take a good look at how we already use the networks we have.
 
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