Resumen
This article focuses on accessing Internet through devices other than personal computer. An enormous number of low-cost Internet-enabled appliances and sensors, actuators and communication devices will enter the market. For example, almost 16 million Internet capable cellular phones entered the Japanese market over the past 18 months, millions of radio LAN devices are in operation and Internet-enabled cameras with radio links have been demonstrated. One could as easily imagine a single purpose device whose principal use is to tune in web-based sources of digital sound and render them audible. The same already happens with MPEG3-encoded audio that can be downloaded and played at leisure or in real time after an interval of buffering to overcome variations in packet inter-arrival time across the network. Despite the apparent demise of the Napster model and its freeform peer-to-peer sharing of audio files, the music industry is being turned upside down. Replacing much of the traditional physical distribution with online digital distribution, such appliances may also point the way toward other special purpose devices for rendering Internet delivered digital content in a variety of ways, including as video, formatted text, images, sound, or a combination of all media.