If It Ain`t Broke, Don`t Fix It!

The just ended Consumer Electronics Show in the U.S. is known as the greatest show on earth, well at least when it comes to high tech gadgets.

And this year didn't disappoint of course. While 3D tv's and motion sensor screens grabbed a lot of headlines, the other big trend was ubiquitous connectivity. In other words the internet of everything.

It's been talked about for a long time and if the consumer electronic gurus are to be believed we'll soon be online 24/7, drifting from one web enabled device to the next.

If the products on display were any indication of what's coming we'll soon be shaving using virtual mirrors, making coffee in IP linked coffee pots and running our lives over smart - or as they prefer to call them now -superphones.

Maybe, but maybe not if the futurists get their way. A number of these people have been saying for a while that we may soon run into something of a technology backlash.

While the gadget frenzy hasn't really shown any sign of abating - video to dvd to web enabled blu-ray, HD disc is a prime example of that - it still remains to be seen how online we all plan to become.

Even a decade into Web 2.0-soon to be fade into Web 3.0 it appears - we're still pretty much using technologies that have been around for a very long time. Think electricity, gas, tv's, radios, telephony, water, cars, trains, and, yes, even the internet.

Most of these have relied on copper to work and to deliver the goods to where we live or work. And that really doesn't look like changing that radically.

In fact the smarter, the faster and the more chips everything starts using the more we'll need copper to make it work properly.

No where is this more obvious than in the other big trend from CES - home energy management. To get the performance and reliability of appliances linked in to a Smart Grid we'll need cables and wires, and not wireless, to do it reliably.

The vision of the future is exciting and no doubt much more digital, but it will always be important to ask questions about performance and to ensure the technology can deliver what it promises it will.

I'm all for connectivity - I wouldn't have helped start Smart Wiring? if I wasn't - but we need to make sure it isn't all built on air.

John Fennell
Jjfennell@copperdev.com