Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: In the short term it looks like cell and wifi will start to combine, if not merge.

WAN and LAN connections are fundamentally different, due to the source of the transmissions. You'll either get a signal from a long distance tower or a short range repeater; both require different physical interfaces, so there won't be a single standard shared between the two. However, I can see receiver chips built with the capability of decoding either signal, and the future will likely provide solutions for accepting both wireless LAN and WAN. By the way, I expect LAN to always be higher bandwidth, due to the proximity of the source signal, while WAN may be more portable, due to the range of the source signal. Travelers will most likely accept WAN, since it means they can move their computers across large distances without interrupting their network, but fixed location PCs will likely find LAN to be more robust.

Re: If cable eventually becomes what ma bell became, a service provider rather than a content supplier, there could be a market for ultra high speed connections. Right now we're limited to what say Comcast wants to provide. I would much rather see an internet where content by URL rulled, opening up the whole world.

What do you mean by this exactly? That each Internet server will connect directly to the clients requesting information, as opposed to through an ISP?