Today I heard a 19-year-old developer say that when he talks to his friends they all assume that cable and DSL broadband access will be irrelevant. He mentioned the $100 laptop and mesh networking, and said that his developer buddies are confident that no one will use traditional networks in a few years. Instead, we'll just pop open our machines, find someone to connect to, and we'll be done. So he and his developer friends are writing applications to suit that world.
That's a great vision, and it very well may come true. But there are some counter-indications. If cities manage to create healthy municipal networks, then why would people living there go through the pain of developing adequate meshes? If all network access points have to be CALEA-compliant, then won't we be in a Prohibition-era-style time of law enforcement hunting out meshes and squashing them? (Maybe that'll just help their growth.) Will we learn how to participate in mesh networks in time to adopt them in large numbers before they become illegal?
Anyway, it was a fine moment. "Why are you guys spending so much time talking about wires and cable?", he was saying. "We don't even think about that stuff."