Stacy's Tech Blog

About 15 years ago, I worked for a company called DATASTORM Technologies. You may remember them, they were the manufacturers of the software PROCOMM and PROCOMM Plus. This was back when the Internet had been around for quite a while, and was really beginning to take hold for home and business users. Communication via the public Internet was BOOMING.

At the time, dial-up was king, with a smattering of ISDN connections to your home, depending upon availability. This was quite a time. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with modem banks were on the way out and small web companies were on the way in and it was the beginning of the DOT COM boom. I often wondered, while I was writing custom ASPECT scripts for dial-up and custom modem strings for “odd ball” modems, what would be the future of broadband.

At that time, cable internet access, was just getting started. I’m not sure if it was the first, but the company (the name escapes me) I first heard about was in East Lansing, MI and had started a pilot on their first broadband (via cable) offering. It made sense to me, who had been working with asynchronous serial communications for a number of years, to capitalize on the comparitively monumental amount of bandwidth available through coax/cable. Of course, there was the bi-directional technical challenge since most cable companies were doing broadcast-only and the hardware to allow return communications from your house was just not present at the POPs around the country.

Well, we all know now that this problem was overcome in most places and copper has been replaced with fiber in many areas.

I predicted then that there would be a convergence of technologies (phone, internet and cable TV) to the broadband provider. Sure enough, that’s a common offering nowadays. So what now? Where do we go from here?

Well, quickly along the heals of combined services on a single wire came WebTV. And now, in some areas, you can have fiber at your house (Verizon FiOS is one that I know of since my dad has it). This is essentially a MetroEthernet connection to your home. Wow. This allows for recording HD movies on a box provided by your broadband provider and then subsequently streaming that across a LAN connection to other TVs in your home. Very cool stuff.

And the next big thing? Well, Server Virtualization, workload hosting and VDI have been gaining momentum over the last few years, so it’s my opinion that Cloud Computing will eventually be offered by your Internet provider.

That’s right. You will soon be able to get a hosted and managed VDI offering from your cable company. Bye bye WebTV. Hello, VDI.

Small businesses who cannot afford a server-class system to run their applications will be able to get the computing power directly from their provider. Internet connectivity, VoIP solutions and server workload hosting all-in-one just like we currently get Cable TV, Phone Service and Internet All-In-One.

Home users, who cannot afford to buy a PC, can get a VDI solution from the cable company. They’ll rent an endpoint device, much like they pay a monthly fee for equipment now.

Large businesses, who likely host their infrastructure in a datacenter, will be able to get their server workloads hosted on their providers “cloud”.

Cloud computing for the masses. Very exciting.

And broadband companies who currently provide a “box” for television viewing will now be able to better leverage that “box” for other things, like delivering applications, hosting VDI images and other home and business uses that are too numerous (and constantly growing) to list here.

The need for personal computers will not likely go away anytime soon. But as the technological challenges are met and exceeded, this type of service delivery will begin to be the norm rather than the excpetion.

So watch out, everyone. Cloud computing and VDI is coming to a living room near you!