[LonePaladin]

A while back, I was thinking about how things have changed in the Shadowrun setting, accommodating newly-developed technologies as well as taking things we haven't yet worked out. This game has always done this, even when it first started -- it had the idea of the direct neural interface and VR when most people (save a certain author) hadn't even thought about it. I was thinking about one aspect that drastically changed recently: the reintegration of wireless tech.

More specifically, I was thinking about this question: Why would wireless have vanished completely by the 2050s? This might have been answered in a recent book (I don't have Unwired), but here's my theory:

Even factoring in the divergence in the timeline around 1990, technology would still progress at an explosive rate. By the 2020s, we'd have global Internet coverage with few or no dead-spots; cheap high-speed Internet access (with, naturally, insanely fast speeds for those with money to spend); devices easily able to talk with each other via wireless link.

Then comes the Crash of '29, with the nastiest computer virus ever running rampant. All this is familiar to anyone who's on this board, so I don't need to reiterate the effects that have been documented.

But here's one that explains why wires came back.

The Crash Virus required three things to propagate: a storage media, some form of OS to enable it to operate, and a way to reach other systems. Consider how many devices today meet these requirements. Naturally, computers and laptops fit, but so do most cellular phones (especially smart-phones), wireless routers, GPS devices, modern game consoles (and even some hand-held types), some of the fancier remote controls, even little 'toy' gadgets that interact with each other.

Consider this: The Crash Virus gets itself planted in someone's netbook. Rather than just immediately start trashing the place, it sits dormant, monitoring the owner's communication hardware (typically, a wireless receiver). The moment it finds a network that's within its range, it connects, plows through any security measures, and plants itself there too. All it takes is one infected computer approaching a Starbucks, and every laptop and smartphone within range is infected within seconds.

Any location offering "Free Wi-Fi" would become a breeding ground for this virus. And that's just to reach the wireless devices within its range; if this area has an active Internet connection, well, it just went global in that 3.8 seconds.

In the year and a half (or so) that Echo Mirage needed to track down and wipe out the virus, there were other steps taken to limit its mobility -- specifically, tearing down the entire 802.11 protocol. Anything using wireless technology -- Bluetooth, WiFi, whatever -- had to be recalled or had to have "mandatory firmware updates" that disabled wireless communication permanently. Considering that the virus tended to burn out hardware as it finished its job in a particular device, this didn't require a lot of work; by the time this process went full-time, many of the targeted items were already rendered useless.

So, with everything having to go back to a direct wired connection, fiberoptics made a reemergence, and everyone grew accustomed to having to plug in their devices to have them talk to each other. This would become the standard state of affairs until the late '50s and Crash 2.0 gave people an incentive to rebuild (again) the Matrix and how it worked.

What do you think? (If any of this has been backed up and/or shot down in any of the books, please provide a reference if you can.)

[FastJack]

Actually, I'm more of the belief in the divergent timeline where the cell-phone industry (and thus, the wireless) didn't blow up. They didn't have the "Clinton Tech Bubble" that we did, where .dot coms and other tech companies reaped in millions of dollars. Without the tech explosion of the mid- to late-90s, cell phones and wireless communications weren't pressed into service as much. I'd speculate that by 2012, in the SR universe, many people were still using dial-up communications to get on the 'net.

[LonePaladin]

Hm. Sounds possible. Anyone remember if the SR1 or SR2 book had anything wireless or cellular in the catalog? That would answer the question, maybe.

[FastJack]

Portable Phones: Portable phones range from the common wrist models, with or without flip-up view screen, to "walkie-talkie" handset units, to audio-only earplug models with lightweight boom microphones. Range is limited, but a booster pack may be worn on the belt or placed on any convenient surface or part of the user's clothes. Portable phones without a fiber link-up are subject to electromagnetic distortions and jamming.

From this entry, it sounds like they don't have anywhere near the cell coverage we have. (Or, AT&T became a monopoly again.)

[Warlordtheft]

IIRC--in one of the matrix books (Matrix 2.0 perhaps) it mentions that the bandwidth for matrix connections was not available in wireless. So yes you could jack into the matrix, but just like going through a satilite uplink at the time it was slow.

[LonePaladin]

That doesn't even sound like a cellular phone. In fact, I'd think the use of the "walkie-talkie" term is telling, along with the 'limited range' part. It sounds more like those little two-way radios you can find nowadays, just with a lot more channels. There were cell phones before the timeline divergence, but they were bricks; it wasn't until the early '90s that they started to become portable and (relatively) cheap.

Not the bills, though. I had one of those phones around '92. Got burned when I took it to another state and made some calls. Got roaming charges, plus long-distance charges, going both ways. Nasty medicine, them teaspoons.

Still, the lack of a reference to a dot-com boom and the whole wireless Internet thing lends weight to your view.

[FastJack]

IIRC--in one of the matrix books (Matrix 2.0 perhaps) it mentions that the bandwidth for matrix connections was not available in wireless. So yes you could jack into the matrix, but just like going through a satilite uplink at the time it was slow.

Ah, yes, Matrix details Wireless Links (p. 33), and tells of how stability was a concern for the links. A Flux rating was in place, and jamming was commonplace, resulting in degradation of wireless signals and making decking difficult. The implications from that seem to back up my theory that there wasn't a cellular network like we have in the Sixth World.

[Nath]

All you need is 1 or 2% of cell phone users developping brain tumors...

Besides, the ongoing tech curve may suffer a big slowdown if we don't find a solution to have twenty or thirty wireless communicating devices at home, not scrambling with each others and with the neighbours'.

[BlackMyron]

 According to some timeline notes I had made, at least one SR source mentioned that pages and cell phones passed into common usage by the late 1990s.

[FastJack]

According to some timeline notes I had made, at least one SR source mentioned that pages and cell phones passed into common usage by the late 1990s.

Ahh, but which edition was it? In 1st and 2nd, cellphones/pagers were still limited because of the limitations in the real world. By the 3rd edition, they were a lot more frequent and game development brought them in further to the game.

[BlackMyron]

 Sadly, I didn't source it - I checked the most likely SBs, but came up with nothing.   

 I would almost credit Nigel Findley, though - he was fond of referring to events in the 1990s.

[Bull]

Keep in mind the original Crash Virus as well.  That didn't just "destroy" the modern day BBS/WWW system, but it actively set back technological advances by destroying all knowledge of things.  Yes, it's a bit silly and strange to say "A computer virus made us forget how to make and operate cell phones", but really it's no stranger than pretty much anything involving the NAN.  Or saying that magic came back to the world and dragons appeared.

It was a storyline element put into place by the early developers to explain why a lot of tech hadn't really progressed much beyond late 80's and early 90's tech levels, and it worked well.  Unfortunately, at some point, people forgot about this and started ramming in new toys as fast as possible to not only match the real world, but to try and get all high tech and stuff.

<shrug>  I like the retro-dystopia of Shadowruns original design and implementation.  Complaining about it is a lot like complaining about Fallout 3's Retro-50's-future setting and how it doesn't "Make sense" in light of modern technology.  But that's the point.  It's a divergent reality, diverging in 1950.  Shadowrun Diverges in 1990.  (Earlier, really, but '90 is a good break point).

Bull

[Chaemera]

My take on it has been as follows:

Shadowrun clearly took fiber optic and ran with it early on. All the technological advances that the RW put into high-speed wireless communications? That energy and capital went into making fiber optic the standard communication medium.

I'm not talking just backbones or FIOS. I'm talking about fiber optic bus-work in your home computer.

Further, processor speed and data storage in SR seem to have shot ahead of ours out of the gate, with development slowing down somewhere in the timeline.

There is only so much money and creative thinking available, if I were making fiber optic cheap and robust enough to use as the standard in home computers and home networks, as well as developing processors / data transfer protocols operating in the googol-flops, as well as the storage capacity to make it worth the speed, I no longer have time or money to waste on commercial wi-fi.

just my 2¥.

[Tagz]

I like to think it was several of the reasons already mentioned but also one other.

Extraterritoriality gave the large corporations free reign to delve into whatever tech they wanted, no more government restrictions.  To me, that explains the huge boom in medical science, neurological science, etc, since they could quickly proceed to human testing.  After all, Sim Sense, cyberware, etc, wouldn't have been possible so quickly without that.

They were free to explore areas that they couldn't before.  That said, they didn't have an unlimited budget for research, nor limitless personnel, innovators, etc.  The big corps would allocate their research in areas they deemed to be profitable.  So naturally the direction the tech developed was different as well.

So to me it went something like this:

• timeline diverges
• wireless being explored
• extraterritoriality comes into play
• advances that make simsense and VR possible occur, wireless continues to advance in the form of more capable cell phones that can use the internet (like today)
• the internet is replaced with the matrix, using simsense and VR as types of interface.  current cellphones can no longer work with the new standard and data requirements and cannot be used with the matrix
• wireless communications research is placed on the back burner as it doesn't seem profitable research at the time.  the research continues but at a much slower pace
• wireless tech advances enough to transmit the amount of data required by the matrix standard
• the size requirements of cyberdecks continues to decrease
• commlinks created in R&D, obvious potential for benefits and profits but cost of updating infrastructure to have wireless transmitters around will make it a hard sell.  expected slow integration and eventual replacement
• crash 2.0 occurs, heavy damage to current infrastructure
• a new infrastructure proposed, using wireless as a major component.  Spun to work on the fears after Crash 2.0 saying the widespread damage could not be duplicated with this system

That's pretty much how I see it.

[Wayfinder]

Tagz that is exactly the way I understood the tech curve for the Matrix. If the tech was developed today to allow for a full immersion VR simsense experience but we had to use wires, the fact is it would overtake wireless devices in no time. Personally if given the choice of the Matrix or a new smartphone app, I'd be jumping in any chance I got.