Whither Wireless? Future Directions in Mobility

Abstract

Wireless technology, including mobile phones, WiFi-enabled laptops, and Bluetooth-connected devices, has become entrenched in today's society, and we can expect this technology and its mobile applications to continue to evolve in the future. But what direction will this evolution take? The purpose of this paper is to look into the future and forecast where wireless is heading, recognizing full well that making such forecasts is fraught with danger. This paper first places the rise of wireless in an historical context relative to other important information technologies of the past. It then reviews mobile issues first presented in 2002 and examines where these issues stand today. The paper next looks at other views about the future of wireless. With this background the paper makes six forecasts about the future of wireless networks, mobile phones, wireless communications standards, wireless security, ultimate commerce, and the wireless market. Drawing on these forecasts, the paper describes several research questions that could yield valuable results in the wireless arena. The paper concludes with one final forecast.Although preliminary work on computers began earlier, the first major computers were developed in the 1940s and the first commercial applications appeared in the 1950s. These early decades, however, were largely ones of technological experimentation and efforts to determine where computers fit in organizations. It was really not until the 1960s that computers found a major place in businesses, and this place was with large, centrally located and controlled mainframe computers.In 1964, IBM introduced the System/360 family of mainframe computers, arguably the most successful line of computers, outside of PCs, ever sold. Along with the System/360 came IBM mainframe operating systems including OS/360. IBM had competitors, sometimes called the seven dwarfs: NCR, Burroughs, Honeywell, CDC, RCA, Univac, and GE, each with their own line of mainframe computers and operating systems.Mainframe computers were big machines kept in big rooms behind locked doors and only directly accessible by those who were highly trained to run them. The rest of us had to turn in our stacks of punch cards and wait hours or sometimes days to get the results back on reams of green and white striped paper. This was batch processing at its worst. The 1960s was an era of centralized computers and organizational applications that were hard to use. We think of it as sometime computing and central place computing. Volume 23Article 19 335

Beyond ‘mobility’: A new understanding of moving with technology

“…It follows from the discussion of portability as enabling ‘computing’ in different contexts that, while devices might have changed in form in the push for portability, the actual use of these mobile devices is most commonly, if implicitly, understood as the manipulation of software (or apps) on a screen requiring focussed user attention. For instance, early research on the use of emerging smartphone technology discussed at length the design of user interfaces for mobile devices to replicate known computing experiences on what was seen to be a severely limited ‘screen real estate’ (Billsus, Brunk, Evans, Gladish, & Pazzani, ; MacKay, Dearman, Inkpen, & Watters, ; Nickerson, ; Pande & Gomes, ). Specifically in the literature on the adoption of m‐commerce, studies (Keith, Babb, Lowry, Furner, & Abdullat, ; Ngai & Gunasekaran, ; Wakefield & Whitten, ; Wang, Lin, & Luarn, ) have drawn on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework and have assessed (among other variables) the ease with which users can manipulate a mobile device's screen interface to navigate the screen's menu and read and compose messages (Hoehle & Venkatesh, ; Keith et al, ; Sarker & Wells, ).…”

“…Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2005, Prasopoulou, Pouloudi, & Panteli, 2006. Junglas and Watson (2006) further show how portability generates localization, the ability to establish the location of a portable device, and identification, the capacity to associate such a device uniquely with one person (see also Nickerson, 2008). These two characteristics are at the heart of mobile e-commerce, also known as m-commerce.…”

“…It follows from the discussion of portability as enabling 'computing' in different contexts that, while devices might have changed in form in the push for portability, the actual use of these mobile devices is most commonly, if implicitly, understood as the manipulation of software (or apps) on a screen requiring focussed user attention. For instance, early research on the use of emerging smartphone technology discussed at length the design of user interfaces for mobile devices to replicate known computing experiences on what was seen to be a severely limited 'screen real estate' (Billsus, Brunk, Evans, Gladish, & Pazzani, 2002;MacKay, Dearman, Inkpen, & Watters, 2005;Nickerson, 2008;Pande & Gomes, 2015).…”