As to your point about the Juniper CEO, I think the point of the piece is that the seemingly little toys like iPhone are actually causing people to reconsider the whole network architecture and it is making some if not all executives reshape their businesses for the future and Juniper is one of them.

Thanks again for participating?

Thanks for the excellent comment. I am doing a follow up series of posts, including one later today which touches upon some on the issues you bring up. Clearly, it is not possible to fit everything in one piece, but hopefully this new series of posts is going to help.

I am not sure you are following the recent changes in the Juniper product line they are making in order to adapt to the new network dynamics. From their new chip architecture to new software layer, Juniper is obviously doing a lot of work to adapt itself.

That is what is his shareholders pay for.

I think LTE Advanced (not the “4G” or LTE of today) changes everything and results in irrevocable disruption of the telco/wireless market. I was lucky enough to work through the transitions of network technologies from dial-up to T1 to T3 & Ethernet and beyond. I think we’ll see a repeat of the rapid growth of greenfield opportunities that ubiquity of sufficient bandwidth brings. This will be the death of voice as a product (vs. a service), the computer companies win out over the telcos. Now, what happens to TV? And others?

Sure, network technologies are progressing at a rapid enough pace to allow for massive amounts of data to be transmitted between centralised datacentres and ‘client’ devices anywhere in the world. But battery, processing, and storage technologies are progressing just as quickly. Indeed, the only thing that remains stagnant is the human capacity to process information. How many terabytes of storage would our phone need to fit before it is able to store all of the information that we regularly access, for instance?

To sum up, cloud services and centralised datacentres will certainly play an important role in the information solution systems of tomorrow. What I have my doubts about, however, is that they will play the crucial role. Why have ‘dumb’ terminals capable only of accessing cloud services, when one will be able to have all of one’s data and processing capacity mirrored and extended across a ‘personal cloud’ composed of the set of one’s own devices, including, but not limited to, the cloud-based storage and processing capacity that one would rent.

Think Dropbox in other words – the data is both hosted on their servers and mirrored across each of your own capable machines. In fact, it would not be stupid to adopt something like ‘user proximity’ as a general design principle – all data should first be processed and held as ‘close’ to the user as possible, propagating across his/her other devices as he/she gets ‘closer’ to them. It should not be a bunch of users orbiting some datacentres; it should be devices and data orbiting users. The user should be at the centre.