Looking Ahead to 2005: 10 innovations, areas to keep an eye on
Changing the look of living rooms, phones, jets
Excertps from Seattle Post-Intelligencer
December 30, 2004
P-I reporters Todd Bishop, John Cook, Dan Richman and James Wallace contributed to this report.
From rapid advances in airplane materials to steady progress by open-source software, companies in the Seattle region remain at the forefront -- and in the firing line -- of some of the world's major technology trends. Here are five of those trends to watch in the coming year.
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VOIP: Voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VOIP, offers the promise of low-cost phone service over the Internet, using conventional phones. It's a growing phenomenon. In early November, there were more than 600,000 U.S. subscribers to VOIP, up from about 130,000 last year, according to the Yankee Group.
Several national companies offer VOIP locally. AT&T Corp. sells it for homeowners in some Western Washington cities. Qwest Communications International Inc. is offering its OneFlex VOIP service, for business owners, in some metropolitan areas. Comcast has said it will make VOIP available in Seattle and elsewhere by the end of 2005. Verizon already makes VOIP available to Seattle-area customers.
Among local companies, Seattle's Speakeasy began offering residential VOIP in September. TeleSym of Seattle said it's working to make more secure software used for mobile VOIP.
In October, Bellevue's AccessLine Communications introduced VOIP service for businesses. And Microsoft this year released "Istanbul," software for office workers that works with VOIP, traditional telephones and other forms of communications.
WIMAX: Just what the high-tech industry needed, another arcane acronym. But WiMax --which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access -- is a wireless technology worth watching. And that's not just because big names such as Dell, Fujitsu, Intel and Motorola have tossed their weight behind it.
Often dubbed "Wi-Fi on steroids," WiMax promises to deliver high-speed wireless Internet connectivity up to 30 miles. That means a laptop user could buy a book on Amazon.com at the zoo, check e-mail at the coffee shop down the street and then on the drive home pull up a restaurant review -- all without losing an Internet connection.
WiMax is still in the early stages of development, with some predicting that it will be another year or two before it firmly takes root. Others claim that it is massively overhyped. But the technology could help solve a problem that has plagued the communications industry for years, getting high-speed Internet connections cheaply into homes and businesses. With WiMax, there is no longer a need to dig up city streets to lay fiber-optic cable. It also could provide high-speed Internet service for small towns that have been bypassed by the phone or cable giants.
Dozens of entrepreneurial companies are jockeying for position in the WiMax market, including Kirkland-based Clearwire and Seattle-based Speakeasy. Both companies, which are backed by Intel, have said they plan to roll out WiMax networks that cover entire cities or counties. Speakeasy will begin testing a forerunner to the WiMax technology next month, with a wireless network that covers most of downtown Seattle. Clearwire, which operates proprietary networks in Jacksonville, Fla.; St. Cloud, Minn.; and Abilene, Texas, plans to roll out wireless broadband networks in 20 cities in the next year. Over time, both companies plan to transition to WiMax-enabled equipment.