On my commute from Chapel Hill to Greensboro, I listen to the podcast of The Economist. Today, I heard a very interesting article from the current print issue of the magazine on Femtocells. Reflecting on this while driving down the highway, I was thinking that I really agreed with the article assertion that this could be a disruptive technology. Today, we think of network-attached devices typically as either cellular capable, or 802.11x capabile (though certainly many devices now have both capabilities). With pervasive rollout of picocells and femtocells, we’ll move closer to ubiquity in coverage in cellular radio networks and the architecture also provides for higher speed connectivity than in the wide area coverage environments, allowing a richer set of applications and media on mobile devices.

As we shrink our laptops and “supersize” our phones, might this provide a means for connectivity to that converged device? That iPhone is looking better and better 😉

I saw an interesting quote in an Educause Review article from the November/December 2007 issue. In a compilation of opinions from 13 CIO’s in higher education, John Bielec from Drexel University said “Why would an institution provide … wireless service five years from now?” Hmmmm….