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The news that the main networking companies are getting ready to launch products that roam between wireless LAN, WAN and mobile phone networks is one of the more obvious cases of the experts catching up with reality.
For years people have been complaining about the high price of mobile phone calls and the lack of a "killer application" for cute but generally useless palmtop-format PDAs. I can almost hear Homer Simpson giving his forehead a thumping now.
But my attitude is probably shaped by a meeting I attended a few years ago where I was lucky enough to meet Jerry Skaggs, a big cheese in the IT department at parcel delivery firm UPS.
He had been brought in to talk at an IBM server event, so he spent a long time detailing the infrastructure used in the UPS datacentre. While this was certainly fascinating, it was also a little too close to the theme of the day for him to say anything overly contentious.
Datacentres, especially those filled with IBM systems, were a very good thing, was the essence of Skaggs' message. But by the time the discussion moved away from servers and onto PDAs and mobile computing, Skaggs was free to vent his frustrations.
He said UPS could not buy suitable off-the-shelf products for its fleet of next-day delivery vans. Pocket PCs and the other mass-market PDAs just didn't offer anything of value to his organisation. Instead, Skaggs said UPS gained enormous competitive advantage from designing its own mobile devices. At the time I met him, UPS was on its third generation of of its bespoke hardware. UPS called it a delivery information acquisition device, or Diad for short, and was working with Motorola to manufacture them. Although never yet sold on the open market, Diads will be familiar to most people as the tablet format PDAs that the UPS delivery people carry around with them as they go about their business.
If you have ever signed for a parcel from UPS, you quite possibly signed for it directly onto the Diad screen.
The beauty of the Diad was that it included three types of radio link to keep it in touch with the UPS datacentre. For example, if UPS had just delivered a package to your reception desk, the Diad would communicate either by GSM or packet-based cellular network to update the tracking system in the datacentre. If the driver was back at the depot, it would pick up a wireless LAN base station and work that way.
Well, I would have been surprised if UPS had not tried to prevent Motorola from selling the idea to its competitors, but by the look of it, UPS didn't quite stop the firm marketing the idea to mainstream businesses.
Over the coming year Motorola, along with Avaya and Proxim and no doubt a horde of others, will be rolling out this type of convergence technology.
Provided they can sort out some of the basic security issues associated with using the current crop of WLAN gear, I reckon they will have an easy time selling them.
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