The Technology Bandwagon

SO, ON A single day, last May, I graduated from:

• CRT low-def TV to 32" flat-panel HDTV,
• an old VCR to DVR,
• 3Mbps/400Kbps AT&T DSL to 20Mbps/6Mbps Comcast cable Internet.

And from wired analog landline to — no landline at all.

After years of wired phones and answering machines, I got on the bandwagon.

I already had a cell phone, and so did my wife.

But I wanted an extra phone number to give out to doctors and insurance companies, etc., so they could leave voicemail. So I got a Google Voice number — it has voicemail (via email, which includes audio MP3 attachment and attempted text transcription), and I configured it to not forward inbound calls to anything. That let's me check the voice mail via email or web browser.

And then I installed the Google Voice app on my Android smartphone. Now I can check voicemail instantly without dialing the cell-phone provider.

Watching TV has changed completely in just a decade. We've gone from a 36 or 50 channels to hundreds. In the olden days you watched whatever was on, including commercials, but only when it was broadcast. Then came the VCR and now you could make a low-quality recording of whatever was on, and watch it later, fast-forwarding through ads. With DVR, by pressing one button, you can make a perfect recording of whatever you want (and it's smart enough to know when to stop recording). Even better, you can "pause" live TV, rewind it, play it in slow motion, and resume.

And you can view and record at the same time. A friend of mine will start recording a football game, then go out and work in his yard. At the beginning of the 4th quarter, he returns and goes back to the beginning of the game, while the DVR continues to record the live game. He watches play after play, skipping through huddles and ads and other delays. After 15 minutes, he's watched every play and is at the beginning of the 4th quarter. Since the DVR has meanwhile been recording that, he can skip his way through most of the 4th quarter as well. Now there's 3 minutes left and he watches that live.

The history of Internet connection speeds is well known. Mostly it's the app usage that leads and the connection technology catches up later. For example, a new website or voice app or video stream may work best at 6Mbps but you can only get 2Mbps wherever you live. (Sometimes it's the reverse.) Gmail, for example, uses about 1MB of traffic just to load its main page (after login). That takes a second or so at 20Mbps (a typical cable-Internet speed). But if Gmail had used that much data 10 years ago, when most people had a 56Kbps dial-up modem, you'd have waited about 3 minutes. However, webmail in those days (pre-Gmail) consisted of very simple HTML — no JavaScript and no AJAX. And all the goodies you now see on a Gmail page were simply not provided. (Today, Gmail does have a "Basic HTML" mode for slow connections.)

So what's not to like?

Well, consider that nice flat-panel TV with its 16:9 aspect ratio (much nicer to watch than old-school 4:3). But many movies since 1955 were filmed in wider ratios than 16:9 (which equals 1.78:1) — like Star Wars (2.2:1), Mr. Holland's Opus (2.35:1), or The Da Vinci Code (2.35:1). And yet the average HD cable channel shows them in 16:9. Which means the sides or tops (or both) have been cropped. Which takes us back to the olden days when 16:9 movies were shown on 4:3 screens.

Why can't we have a law that says all movies must be provided in the full original frame, even if that means no-content areas on top and bottom?

And consider phones and their voice quality. In the 1980s, AT&T and other wireline carriers made a big deal about how fast and reliable their connections were and how crystal-clear the sound quality was. They were right. Quality was excellent for a phone line and for average consumer phones. Now, with cell phones, the standard has dropped back to 19th century levels.

As for the Internet, the speed and quality of a cable-modem connection is excellent — but it's expensive.

Still, it's all a huge improvement and revolutionary change in just 10 years.

What will it be like in 2021?

I predict that a free or low-cost WiMax or other wide-area wireless Internet will change things even more:

• The cell phone, TV, and Internet providers will morph into competing WiMax companies.
• Mobile and fixed-location phones will use this ubiquitous WiMax Internet for voice calls (and data), instead of cellular technology. Quality and connections will be much better.
• Cable will disappear as TVs get all their content from WiMax. There will be a wider market and more distribution channels for on-demand movies — via WiMax — so we can watch more of what we want (including true aspect ratio).
• There will be multiple WiMax networks in every city, so the current wire monopoly will be a thing of the past. With true competition, connecting to the Internet will cost a lot less.

And when all that happens, people will still complain — about something. It's always something.