November 17, 2010

• Random thoughts on electrical sockets

  I was just thinking randomly if you were an institution trying to decide whether to install easily accessible electrical sockets in a public area of a building you are building would it be a good idea?

  I don’t mean just putting like a couple but like wiring the whole place so there are sockets everywhere at easy reaching distance.

  Certainly in the far past there were virtually no benefits to doing so. Maybe someone uses your electricity for a light or something.  If someone used it for a personal space heater that might be nice but your probably paying for central heating anyway and those things in the past drew so much energy that they could be quite dangerous.  Portable televisions and portable radios and stereos and stuff existed but were not in heavy use and battery powered walkmans replaced the latter two.

  Still if you were farsighted you might have decided to install the sockets just banking on the fact that future technology would almost certainly be heavily electricity based.

  Your gamble would have paid off over the last 7 or 8 years as laptops took off with a vengeance. Now these people love to plug in and for the most part they need to if they’re going to stay in any area for any extended period of time. You would be providing a considerable service that makes your place stand out as a place that laptop users will want to go. Not only that but you might even have thought you were providing a long term service for the world as if we ever get truly smart grid technology it will mean that the more battery nodes we have plugged in all the time the more efficient the network.

  BUT now things have changed somewhat. Now laptop technology is becoming increasingly small and efficient. Netbooks and super slim laptops like the Macbook Air are all the rage in new laptops. Tablets and e-readers have finally started to take off with a vengeance too and people are more and more using their cellphones as more of a primary computing interface.  What all of these share in common is that they have very long battery lives and over time it appears they will get increasingly long battery lives.

  That means it will be considerably less essential for people to charge these devices while on the go. In fact getting out the cable and plugging them in will be more of a hassle than anything else. People will just want to pull them out and start working.  Charign them will be something people do while at home overnight, especially if they can just toss the devices on a wireless charge station without even having to pull out a plug.

  Now if this is the case, does it make sense to invest in making sure there are a lot easily available electrical sockets in your building? If you already invested it will it be a wasted investment?

  You might argue that people will still want to charge their laptops and other devices in your place and not everyone will have the super efficient laptops. That may be true. But your institution won’t stand out considerably from other institutions as a place people will go because it makes it easy to plug in. MOST people will be able to use their computer technology anywhere. They won’t be drawn to your institution particularly. Most likely the people who are plugging in are basically just using your electricity in order to avoid having to pay for it at home. And that’s not a problem if you are getting something from it in return but are you? 

  And really we just don’t know whether there will be more demanding technology that requires more direct electricity beyond what rapidly improving battery technology will enable that you’ll want to plug in at a coffee shop or a restaurant or a lobby. Right now I don’t see anything on the horizon. I guess people could plug in their segways but that’s all I can think of and how many people are going to have those?

  I imagine there are similar devil’s bargains all the time with how rapidly technology is changing. You probably had a similar problem if you updated your institution to have ethernet jacks all over the place to provide internet or phone line jacks for modems.  And in the future we can see a similar problem that will emerge if local wireless broadband internet gets eclipsed by cellular broadband coverage through networks like 3G and 4G.

  Luckily the initial cost for setting up a local wireless network is pretty low: all you need is a good wireless router (or several) and a cable/dsl modem. You can cancel your broadband service if 3G/4G becomes the dominant internet mechanism. So this is definitely more of an issue the bigger your initial costs are.

  Similarly what about looking ahead for the far future? Would it make sense for example to setup your whole building for easy wireless device charging throughout the building? That really WOULD be a service people would like right now, assuming it’s safe, that would distinguish you from your competitors. But would technology eventually just make such endeavors useless and obsolete?

  I suspect this is sort of a piece of a bigger puzzle about how hard it is to get businesses to quickly adopt new technologies because of how risk averse they are and how quickly technology evolves.  It’s something worth thinking about.

  Anyways, these thoughts brought to you by the fact that I am sitting in a student lounge and there isn’t a single damn plug to plug my not very energy efficient laptop in anywhere near me. But hey maybe they’re not just too lazy to put them in. Maybe they’re the ones smart enough to have planned for the future.

  • 8:40 pm
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