Bandwidth and the creation of awareness
Martin Cooper · Communications of the ACM · 2001
The article focuses on the inexorable growth and resulting abundance of fixed and untethered bandwidth, that will set the stage for innovations in telecommunication field and profoundly affect human society for the next 1,000 years. The author's approach to viewing the forthcoming centuries is to first examine those networks that carry the content and the terminals that transfer it between people and machines in the context of the abundance of bandwidth and the continuing advancement of device technology. In general, the delivery of bandwidth can be described as the creation of awareness. Future spectrum utilization will progress to the point that the entire useful radio spectrum is available to each human on the planet. Each base station will be little more than an antenna or antenna array with radio-frequency electronics, system intelligence, and self-contained nuclear power supply unified with the radiating element. In the future, the "terminal" will evolve into an awareness machine" providing the user sensory connections to the outside world.