Impact of Wireless and Broadband technology on society
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The impact of wireless and broadband technology on society
With advances in wireless and broadband technologies the lives we lead are starting to be radically altered. Whether or not these changes are 'good' or 'bad' are the opinions of the individual, it cannot be argued however that the growing roll out of these technologies will allow people access to a greater selection of activities during their daily lives. In this essay I will briefly outline the technologies and discuss a selection of 'activities' with their advantages and their impact on society and the individual. The viewpoint I take on this matter is that whilst the advances being made make everything easier and faster for the individual, they diminish our physical social interaction with one another.
The term broadband refers to Internet access methods that allow a connection faster than standard analogue modems and ISDN. Connection types included by this term are cable modems and ADSL, among others, which typically have speeds of around 500kbps as opposed to the 128kbps of ISDN. These sorts of connections allow a much faster access to files on the internet and also provide the possibility of streaming audio and video, although video may not necessarily be streamed at a high quality as this requires speeds of 2mbps for Mpeg-4 format.
Wireless is a technology that can be identified by the term "mobile". Wireless technology is basically any device that can establish a data connection without wires, such as mobile phones, GPS devices and laptops with wireless capabilities which often depend upon mobiles. The obvious example here is the mobile phone which allows people to keep in contact with each other anywhere in the world, also mobile phones can be used to access certain internet facilities using wap technology, provided they are within range of broadcasting antennas...