Om Malik wrote some editorial a few days ago about the recent announcement by ECI Telecom.

Mostly though, he does a profile of Professor John Cioffi. And although his track record is impressive, the world has not suddenly been delivered a magic bullet for hyperspeed broadband access.

ECI noted that:

DSM [Dynamic Spectrum Management] is a promising technology expected to provide reliable, fiber-optic-like rates over the existing copper infrastructure. DSM is expected to have a significant impact on the market, as the DSL industry is looking for solutions beyond VDSL2 to increase subscriber broadband rates.

The establishment of this multi-disciplinary consortium, funded for three years, and effectively underwritten by the Israeli Government stands the commercial development of the technologies in very good stead; rather than remaining “slideware”, a commitment has been made to push for new FTTC-based last mile platforms and in a very public way. ECI presented a discussion on DSM and the partnership at Broadband World Forum in Paris, the proceedings of which I have not yet seen released.

Integrating three tertiary institutions into a commercial consortium will be no mean feat. Many a telco research initiative in this country between universities and businesses has hit structural roadblocks, and technologies commercialised out of university research make a big bang at press release time, but fade into unrecognisable-by-the-public consolidation. In 2000, I watched as Radiata took USD$295m from Cisco and have been waiting ever since to see the “leading semiconductor technology” reappear proudly as Powered By Radiata (TM).

So why do we often latch onto The Next Great Thing and the Way Of The Future technology or innovation? I believe it’s human nature to engage with the fruits of clever endeavour, but it could be a result of a disbelief in scientific principles. That is, if we have a problem today, never fear: the solution is “Coming Soon!”; physics can be beaten into submission by new technologies via science.

I hear very similar comments The Next Greatest Thing made by broadband and telco companies in Australia, but they are usually referring to one or more of:

• New vendor product release that bests the industry leader by “blah” percent
• ADSL 2, 2+, VDSL2, or acronym-next access technology
• Proprietary, patent-pending, announced today solution to worldwide problem

Yes, the emerging and developing technologies of “soon” can help new business become viable: but shouldn’t genuinely-sturdy propositions for customers be able to be deployed on “Network Any”?

At least now we know how many South Pacific Pesos (aka Australian Dollars) we will have to part with in order to have an Ultimate ™ experience.

Kelly Mills tells me that Vista Ultimate is to cost AUD$751:

Australian IT – Vista to drive PC upgrades (Kelly Mills, OCTOBER 10, 2006)

And Domayne franchisee Gary Wheelhouse would quite like the attendant income from hardware (fast enough to run all the visual decorations):

“There is good pent-up demand for Vista, which will be coupled with hardware sales.”

Vista Ultimate (RC1, soon to be RC2) runs nicely under Parallels on my MacBook Pro, and that’s where it will stay: in a window, always at hand, yet quittable at a keystroke. The internet guru Frank Arrigo was also kind enough to pass on the current beta of Office 2007.

The Ribbon interface neither excited nor disappointed me, but the first thing I turned off was personalized [sic] menus. They are the bane of my existance when using Windows, and I always turn them off as quickly as possible.

Screenshots open in a layer (via Lightbox 2).