The word for the times is virtualization, and why not? It offers us so many advantages in efficiency and scalability. Unfortunately, human behavior has not caught up with the technology that can make us so much more efficient.

Virtualization has many layers:

Virtual Locations: Schools, Offices

Virtual Travel: Webex (all virtual meeting technologies), Telepresence

Virtual Infrastructure & Cloud Computing: SaaS, (Software as a service), Hosted Applications, Hosted Servers, Hosted Storage, High-Availability and Disaster Recovery, VMware, Hyper-V

Bandwidth and Networking Technologies

The Internet spawned this revolution; but for a long time, access to the internet was slow and expensive. To this day, there are still challenges in gaining access to anytime, anywhere Internet access.

In 1996, I moved to a “ru-burb” (more rural than a suburb) of New Orleans. The cost of calling my friends and family rose from zero, to roughly 25 cents per minute. I studied access to a Remote Exchange. This would push the calling area closer to me and eliminate the “per minute” charges. The cost was about $600 a month. Can you even imagine this dilemma today, only 15 years later? VoIP would have solved this problem quickly and effectively.

Not very long ago, proximity to the CO (Central Office) was a limiting factor to Internet access. DSL Technologies require close proximity to a DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer). These typically reside in the CO, where space and power are scarce. Cable and Fiber Optics (FiOS) are major improvements, but still fixed location services.

3G Wireless technology and the proliferation of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) hotspots provide a major breakthrough in the virtual world. The “game changer” will be 4G Wireless Technologies. With 100Mbps moving access speed, this technology will be a major breakthrough in completing the Virtualization Model.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be diving deeper into this topic and examining ways to best exploit these “Layers of Virtualization.”

In the meantime, on your daily commute home, ask yourself two questions:

Why is the traffic so bad?

And,

Does it have to be?