Always-On: Eat At Home

Joi Ito wonders on the value that GPRS carriers can offer by providing content to users on the go. He notes that the pay-as-you-go route is best served for time- and presence-sensitive information services more so than the traditional corpus of "content".

The main value that always-on provides is presence information, short messages and time sensitive stuff like news. I don't really see the need to have broadband to do that. I think the carriers should focus their energies on stuff like identity, payment systems, IM and presence and leave the content business up to people who know how to move large volumes of bits around at low cost. The problem with most telephone companies is that they have spent their whole lives worrying about quality of service, but moving large volumes of data around is not about quality of service. You can afford to drop a few bits if they're not time sensitive and it's a completely different game than the circuit business.

Source: Joi Ito's Web, " Carriers should be context providers"

The comments on the post are especially colorful. One interesting point raised was that of the persistent Wi-Fi network, or Wi-Max perhaps. It does seem more than likely that the net cast by Wireless IP could be a strong compliment, competitor, or both to the 3G and 4G cellular networks. There have already been rumblings that the integration is set to happen and VOIP seems to be picking up some much needed steam. Who knows, anything's possible ;)

This, of course, presents another use scenario that could be problematic for the Always-On consumer. The same technology I described earlier could also be applied to mobile devices and cell phones. A User-Context Gateway (UCG) could easily be embedded into the device itself and provide much needed filtering while single-handedly preventing the embarrassment associated with inappropriate, untimely phone calls and alarms. As an owner of a Treo 600, I have already seen software that allows me to redirect, filter or otherwise block calls based on time of day and calling number. The move to a UCG seems almost too natural for an integrated device like this -- and realistically for most connected communicators.