A Look Forward Over the Next Four Years

By Tom Leddo, Chief Operating Officer

This is the second article in a two-part series. Article one is titled “A Look  Over the Last Eight Years.”

In the accompanying blog, A Look Back Over the Last Eight Years, I write about the cultural changes that have occurred from 2009-2017, the timeframe when Barack Obama was President of the United States. Of course, I am commenting on the revolutionary changes that resulted from the mainstream acceptance of the smartphone – not politics. The inspiration for that blog was the number of smartphones being used to take photos of Obama as he greeted attendees at his farewell speech in Chicago during his last week in office. As I watched this play out on TV, I pondered how “that would not have even been possible eight years prior because not enough people owned a smartphone when George W. Bush left office.”

In this accompanying blog, I pause to look ahead to the cultural changes we anticipate as the smartphone continues to impact our daily lives. Similar to when I watched the Obama farewell address, I watched Donald Trump take the oath of office and noticed someone holding a phone over Trump’s left shoulder (note the screenshot above). This individual shot a personal video of the historic moment when the Constitutional Republic of the United States of American transfers power.

If we look forward over the next four years or so, I am sure we will be amazed at the continued technological advancements over the duration of President Donald Trump’s administration. We will see significant network evolutions including 5G wireless and the Internet of Things enabling smart cities, autonomous operations, real-time health monitoring and a plethora of applications to advance society and make our lives easier.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, we can expect big advancements in software that brings voice recognition into the mainstream, turning our phone into a hub that controls our entire home and blows our mind with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities.

This WSJ article also points out that we may see a plateau in the development of smartphones themselves. In other words, we do not expect a lot of innovation in the hardware unless there are huge leaps in the use of pliable glass that may allow us to fold a tablet and slip it in our pocket.

Bendable glass! What’s next? Self-lacing shoes? Oh wait, those already exist. Well maybe someone will develop an app that links my phone to my self-lacing shoes for some reason that I can’t yet imagine but will be using daily in the next 4-8 years.

All these mobile apps only work if there is an underlying network with enough capacity to enable them. The insatiable appetite that consumes network bandwidth will not end.   So, In the meantime, Md7 will keep working to get sites On-Air Faster to enable this exciting future!

January 26, 2017
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