Negroponte switch

In the 1980s Professor Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab at MIT originated the meme, that came to be known as the "Negroponte Switch".^[1][2][3] Put simply he suggested that due to accidents of engineering history we had ended with static devices - such as televisions receiving their content via signals travelling over the airways while devices which should have been mobile and personal - such as telephones were receiving their content over static cables. It was his idea that a better use of available communication resource would result if the information (such as phone calls) going through the cables was to go through the air and that going through the air (such as TV programmes) was to be delivered via cables. Negroponte called this "trading places," but his co-presenter (George Gilder), at an event organised by Northern Telecom called it the "Negroponte Switch" and that name stuck.

As more mobile devices need connections to the data network, and bandwidths required and deliverable in wired or fibre-optic systems grow, it becomes steadily less sensible to use wireless broadcast as a way of communicating with static installations. At some point the switch takes place, as the limited radio bandwidth is reallocated to data service to mobile equipment, and television and other media move to cable.

Cory Doctorow an author and also sometime Electronic Frontier Foundation activist has described the process of the switch as unwiring, which is also a move away from a global internetwork which in reality passes through many chokepoints where data may be controlled and inspected toward one which uses available bandwidth frugally by passing communications in a mesh and avoids chokepoints.

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross write of it, firstly in work associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other techno-futurist groupings, and secondly in their collaboration on a novel in progress Unwirers,^[4] which is published in its evolving state.^[5]

The blending of civil liberty and technology may be considered as an effort to reimplement the Internet in the interests of the users, freedom and democracy.

See also

• Being Digital, a book by Negroponte which discusses the topic
• Warrier interviews Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala on the theme of Negroponte switch

References