Not many years ago, broadband was something you got only from a hard-wired office PC. Now it's as easy as flipping open a laptop in a coffee shop or, increasingly, using a smart phone. Understanding the potential of broadband networking in five or 10 years requires not just looking at what's happening inside the labs but listening to the tech visionaries.

Consider the efforts to eliminate a mobile device's reliance on one broadband network. Companies are developing chipsets and IP multimedia subsystems to make it easy for mobile devices to pass from one network to another, depending on network availability, without losing a connection. Imagine leaving the house with your smart phone connected to your home LAN, having it automatically switch to a fourth-generation cellular network on the bus, then to a WiMax network downtown, and then to your company's wireless LAN in the office. "Conversations won't stop and people won't understand that you've changed technologies," says Mark Francis, VP of enterprise architecture at AT&T Labs.

David Goodman, a program director at the National Science Foundation's computer and network systems division, envisions mobile devices that one day will use peer-to-peer networking to ensure a broadband connection. For example, a smart phone that can't get a strong signal would wirelessly seek out a nearby phone that can and make data download through the other phone's wireless connection.

You're Being Followed
People are accustomed to managing any number of digital identities for their home phones, personal cell phones, work cell phones, work E-mail, home E-mail, and more. And each of these identifies is tied to a specific wireless or wired network. Imagine that instead of this complexity, you had a personal network that followed you everywhere.

That's the vision of Jayshree Ullal, a senior VP at Cisco Systems. Individuals would have a transferable identity that maintains the same look and feel regardless of network or device. A single set of personal preferences--such as how calls and text messages are prioritized depending on the sender--would even follow you to the workplace. "The whole concept is 'I'm my own portal,'" Ullal says. "It's virtualization to the ultimate degree."

Network complexity is something IT and telecom managers grapple with every day, and it's becoming even more of a challenge with newer communications technologies such as presence, which lets employees indicate their whereabouts and availability via the network. To enable presence information on IP handsets and PC-based phones, network administrators have to integrate information on user devices with Microsoft's Active Directory or other directory clients in a process that often takes days. AT&T Labs is developing a next-generation service delivery platform and is changing the way network traffic is labeled in an effort to eventually make that model obsolete. With a click or two, an entire enterprise would be presence-enabled, says Siroos Afshar, AT&T Labs' senior technical consultant for services over IP architecture.

Meanwhile, work is under way to widen the broadband pipes, in some instances, for distributed supercomputing. Internet2, a group formed by a number of universities a decade ago to focus on next-generation networking, has been buying cheap, unused fiber from carriers and is creating high-speed links between academic institutions, so that highly complex supercomputing tasks can be performed from one university on data residing at another several states away. Steve Corbato, consultant for Internet2 and associate director for the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, expects the work eventually will flow over into the business world.

"As we learn how to mine data and apply visualization techniques better, and if we demonstrate the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of these techniques," Corbato says, "it drives down the costs of these services for a standard computing environment."