The future of mobility laid out

Following on from the future era of 'Tera' that Intel espoused this morning, mobility guru Kevin Kahn has been talking to us this afternoon abut the work Intel is doing to further the future of mobile and wireless technology.

To improve user's experience in the future, they will want access to anything you want, whenever you want it, wherever you want it, and that you'll want to be able to get at that data with more ease, reliability and security.

Laying out what Intel was doing to address those pretty wide-reaching goals, Kahn identified a couple of areas to work on specifically:

• Spectrums and standards: The types of wireless access available around the world need to be unified so that it's possible to pull out a data device anywhere in the world and have it connect with no further interaction.
  
• Networks: The range, bandwidth and security of data networks needs to be improved, with seamless access to both cellular and WiFi networks and easy international roaming.
  
• Hardware: Making platforms more energy efficient, research into better antennas, low power radios.

Identifying the massive range of network providers across the world, Kahn lemented that "I have to give my credit card to far too many websites across the world to get onto wireless systems. That has to improve: there was a time when that was the case with cellphones, and we got through that. We need to do the same for wireless data."

One of the major problems with networking speeds is error correction, and Intel said that it had come up with a way to speed up the Cyclic Redundancy Checks that are crucial to networking transfers: its new 'Slicing By Eight' algorithm speeds up CRC checks by up to three times, and is available to download now from SourceForce.

At the convention centre, Intel is also demonstrating seamless access, with cellular and WiFi networks being interconnected, meaning that with suitable hardware, our laptops should be able to switch between the networks as we move around the convention centre. We'll be sure to give that a go later on in the week and let you know how it goes.

Having spent a lot of our time crying about the lack of proper wireless access at various trips we've been to around the world, the prospect of seamless, blanket availability of networking is something that definitely appeals. Does the lack of WiFi at your favourite sofa-spot get you down? Let us know your networking experiences and pet hates over in the News Forum.