Coming soon: the video phone

Ever since Dick Tracy in the 1946 comics used his wristwatch as a video phone we have been waiting for the day when the video telephone would become a reality. Brave call, but that day may just be around the corner. At least according to a report [1] by George Gilder and Bret Swanson for the Discovery Center. In a major study on bandwidth demands out to 2015, Gilder and Swanson have predicted U.S. Internet traffic will increase 50 times from 2006 levels, reaching what they call a Zettabyte [2] of traffic  by 2015. Driving about a third of this increase will be video telephony which they predict will reflect about 400 exabytes of traffic (current total traffic is about 50 exabytes). What the handset will be and what the customer experience will be we don't know. And will it be the "we don't care about privacy" Facebook generation which leads the uptake?  --Tom [3]