Hold on Oscars! Telecom industry releases documentary on 'The Future of the Network'

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is a little late for this weekend's Oscars, but the outfit this week has nevertheless revealed the first in a four-part documentary series on "The Future of the Network."

The first of these videos, marked by the foreboding voice of the narrator and serious mood-setting background music, focuses on machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things. The video is about 20 minutes long (might seem longer to those of you not into listening to vendor reps drone on about "value chains," etc., sometimes from industry trade show floors) and can be viewed here. 

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We're told early in the documentary that "Now our machines talk to each other and learn from one another, creating a systematic intelligence that will reshape the industry, the network and very likely the entire world! ... Are we going to drown in a tidal wave of interconnected devices?"

How did Michael Bay ("Armageddon," "Transformers," etc.) miss out on this project?

The video, featuring insights from an earnest crew of industry pros from Alcatel-Lucent, Intel and others, goes on to explain the connection between M2M and IOT and BYOD, among other things.

The most interesting part of the video is a tour of Florida Atlantic University's Smart Building, a little more than halfway through the piece.

Future episodes will cover broadband capacity, the future of government, health and education networks, and cloud computing. The series is slated to be entirely available by October, when the TIA 2013 conference is held in Washington, D.C.

Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook page, as well on Twitter and Google +.

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