Executive Outlook: The ABCs Of The M2M Switch

By Field Technologies magazine

Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and the founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Association. In the early 1990s, he suggested that signals traveling by wireless methods (e.g. television) would soon be transported by landline technologies, and signals that historically traveled by landline methods (e.g. telephone) would soon be delivered wirelessly. George Gilder called this view the Negroponte Switch because it implies a reversal of traditional signal transport modes. This prediction anticipated the sweeping changes in the telecommunications landscape.