These days it can be easy to take for granted that you will have Internet access of some sort almost everywhere you go.  It’s so easy to take for granted because you probably will…at least if you’re among the roughly 80% of us here in the U.S. who spend most of our time in urban and suburban settings.  What a difference the last decade has made in the way we think about getting online.  I’m not talking so much about what we use Internet access for (though that question is inextricably linked to when and how well we’re able to get connected), but rather in what settings we expect to be able to get connected, and with what types of devices.

Ten years ago while retrofitting my apartment for 100BT Ethernet, I recall thinking that before long every new house, condo complex, and apartment building would be fully wired for network connectivity from the get-go.  Internet connectivity (or whatever we might be calling it in the future) would be a basic utility, no different than water or power, quite possibly no different at all from cable/satellite TV and phone service, as those older mediums of communication would most likely be abstracted to ride IP like everything else at some point down the line.  The questions left open in my mind revolved around the technical details of future connections – copper or fiber, multicast or unicast, symmetric or asymmetric.  It honestly didn’t occur to me that whether and how we get connected outside of our homes and workplaces might be the more interesting question.  At the time, I did have an 802.11b network running at home (a relative rarity in 2000).  It was easy to see that the collection of standards soon to be known as Wi-Fi would have a significant impact on the future of networking, but like many at the time I saw 802.11 primarily as an adjunct technology for getting laptops connected or bridging nearby networks on the cheap – in short, as a more convenient but less reliable and much less secure alternative to the CAT5 I was pulling through my ductwork.  Like any self-respecting geek, I knew Wi-Fi and the other wireless data networking options which were soon to come were cool and had great potential, but the context within which we now view wireless connectivity – devices, networks & carriers, hotspots, etc – wasn’t yet apparent.

Fast-forward ten years and that context is all around us.  Our nice, fat (usually wired) connections at home and at work are more important than ever, but most of us make use of them from laptops which hop wireless networks so often we sometimes inadvertently connect to the wrong one.  Once we move out into the world, beyond the boundaries of our private networks, we have Wi-Fi hotspots on every street corner and most places in between.  On campuses, in public parks and malls, and in some cases across entire cities we have WDS mesh networks which push Wi-Fi ubiquity about as far as it can currently go.  And then there are the mobile telephony carriers – love them or hate them, the semi-complete coverage of large areas provided by the current deployments of 3g data services such as HSPA and EVDO have opened up a level of ubiquitous data connectivity unimaginable a decade ago.  The fact that we complain so bitterly when we aren’t within solid wireless data coverage shows just how much we’ve come to expect and rely on it.

With any luck, there will be less reason to complain in the future.  Between the continued buildout of existing infrastructure, the reorganization and more efficient use of public spectrum, the deployment of next generation technologies such as WiMax and LTE, and the ever-improving chipsets and protocols used by our smart phones and laptops, the era of truly ubiquitous high-speed connectivity in our pockets will be upon us.  We’re beta testing the possibilities now, and the consensus seems to be “more, more, more“!