Have you been following the adventures of Huawei? Do you realize now why Bell Canada was so wrong when it dumped Nortel Networks? The once famous Bell subsidiary did not just encompass Canada’s past leadership in telecom technology, it was our future. Bell blew it.
Bell has always been a company that lives in the past. It used to be known as the widow’s and orphan’s stock. It had a lock on Eastern Canada with a vast network of copper wire. Today it has invested billions in fibre optics, based on foreign technology.
But the 5G networks are coming and we are in trouble, no matter what. We are damned if we do not move with the technology and damned if we do. This is the next generation and fibre optics will become just a back-office connector as 5G equipment fills the airways. If you had told me 20 years ago that a single wireless modem in my home would feed multiple high definition, flat screen televisions, I would have thought you were watching too many Star Wars movies.
It seems like all my life I have been running in place just to keep up with rapidly changing technologies. I always was an early adapter. I had a telephone in my car and no room left in the trunk when there were only eight frequencies allotted to radio telephones in Toronto. I had the first cell phone while they were still putting up the cell towers all over the city. Today, you can give me a smart phone and I would just as likely pitch it in the bay.
But when it comes to an Internet of Things (IoT) network technologies—even 5G—it is still physical equipment operated by computer software. What the hell are people afraid of? If the Chinese have the best 5G equipment, our software experts will soon find out if there are channels in it back to Beijing. And I am sure that Microsoft has it all over Huawei when it comes to being intrusive.
And if you have information that you do not want to share, do not put it where people can see it. It is called the attractive nuisance doctrine.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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