I know we are only a year into the current next-gen, a term I loathe to begin with, but I was reading an interesting article over at the Washington Post regarding Verizon’s new open wireless standard.
Verizon Wireless’s new policy also opens the network to a host of other devices, such as video game consoles, digital cameras and home appliances equipped with special chips, a system similar to the WiMax network proposed by Sprint and the WiFi-enabled service touted by T-Mobile.
What’s cool about this is, in theory, Sony or Microsoft could integrate Verizon’s chipset into their console and build a constant always on connection. Think of it like Xbox Live, but available anytime, anywhere with no cables or setup. Out of the box you’d have millions of console gamers connecting to the same network to play games, download demos, and interact with each other. Not only that, by guaranteeing that everyone is on a network, it opens that network up to be a standard feature for developers like a hard drive or a certain type of display.
Hopefully we’ll see more Cell phone companies do this as it really opens up a lot of potential on not only gaming, but tons of other fronts.
