This article was published on June 26, 2012

Issue v0.6: Aral Balkan – The Future is Already Here


Issue v0.6: Aral Balkan – The Future is Already Here

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The future of communication is already here, it’s just – to paraphrase William Gibson – not evenly distributed. Instead of radical departures from what we have, we will most likely see incremental improvements.

The bottleneck today isn’t new mediums of communication–video, images, sound, and text serve us very well–but that we are limited in having continuous access to these mechanisms of communication. Most of these limitations are, furthermore, artificial in nature and imposed by the old-guard gatekeepers, the mobile network operators.

The next revolution will be always-on, always-broadband communication. And for that we need a radical rethink of the role of the operators and of infrastructure. When we talk about “designing the whole widget” in the age of mobile broadband, the whole widget must include the network. The first company that builds the whole widget in this manner will again revolutionize communications. 

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