The New World Media Using IPv6
by Tom Myers

The world of technology is an illusive one. We have come to expect the parameters of "Moore's Law" to rule our advances, when in fact Moore's Law is a myth based on the advances of semiconductors and does not predict the flow of technology advancement whatsoever. Successful new products are most often being put together by technology mining, as opposed to new inventions. Although emerging technologies become part of many new products, their complete usage is often discovered in second and third generation products.

This is important to realize when working with new technology developments and ideas such as IPv6. The technology prophets of from the past, such as Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell are actually being replaced by modern-day prophets such as Chester Gould, Gene Rodenberry and George Lucas. This group represents the multitude of visionaries that look at the future through the lens of comic books and science fiction, two fictional genres that have in the past and will continue in the future to set the pace for many of the world's technological advancements.

Imagine a world where Chester Gould's idea of a Dick Tracy "video watch" dons the wrists of people on the street, or a place in which people use three dimensional holographs to interface in real-time. These breakthroughs in communications actually will get a lot closer with the confluence of fiction-reading innovators and new technologies such as IPv6.

With IPv6 we can now link a world of appliances together through a "new Internet" that can only be imagined. I once heard a learned professor state that more inventions came from Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers than almost any other source. It is when we open our minds to the impossible that the possible can exist.

For media this will mean that mass media will be more than TV, radio, telecommunications and the Internet. Mass amounts of media will be able to be multicast synchronously to multiple users worldwide without regard to bandwidth. Although we have great compression technologies and high bandwidth channels, one of the latest developments in communications that will excel in an IPv6 world is synchronous communications on multiple channels.

With multiple appliance device locations in one communications portal and with new communications and media synchronization technologies, the idea of a Terabit (BYTE?) (that's right terabit) per second delivery to a device is not out or the question. The result is a communications and media tool that is unlike anything that we could have imagined in the past.

Many of these technologies are being developed now. One company has even embarked on a video synchronization technology that when coupled with existing communication technologies can bring 100 Gbps delivery today, and these breakthroughs will continue into the future.

What does this mean? Thanks to the creative application of IPv6, a flood of innovation from today's prophets has begun to emerge , and what is even more exciting is the anticipation of seeing where the technology prophets of tomorrow will come from today. New ideas will always do at least one important thing: spawn even more new ideas. We may have some idea as to where IPv6 will lead us today, but give us a few years and our imaginations will soar, IPv6 and its creative coupling with other new technologies will have the type of impact that will give us a world that we can only imagine today.