While you may not have heard of 2N products, they have been big in Europe for years. Recently, the company was purchased by Axis Communications, which has brought this line of intercom, door station and access control products to the North American market.

I was born when cars had fins, gasoline was 20 cents a gallon and the milkman filled your suburban front porch box with dairy products on a regular basis.

Our industry needs to focus on providing usable high technology products and services for our end users.

It appears that the “battle” between UTP cabled and Wi-Fi IP connectivity options has been won by wireless. Wi-Fi is now built-in to smart devices, laptops, IP cameras and other technologies used by our industry.

I must admit that as I advance in age, I become more resistant to the changes that technology brings.

As our world becomes increasingly dependent on technologies of various types, some systems have become so complex that they can be hard for the average end user to fully utilize and control.

As our industry continues to march toward the interconnectivity of various IP, analog and other types of devices, there is a universal need for testing devices that will ensure connectivity, power consumption and other metrics that will determine whether a device will function and how it will work.

There are two major trends that I have been following that will have dramatic effects on our industry.

About five months ago I was taking out the trash to the alley cans behind the bunker in Bucktown when I spied a telephone company truck with a big roll of cable mounted on the back. I walked over and took a quick glance at the cable, which indicated that the cable was 144-count singlemode fiber optics.

As innovations such as facial recognition, wide dynamic range, and multi-megapixel images continue to be developed by our industry’s IP camera manufacturers, the issue of the maximum length of UTP Cat5e/6 that can be installed to meet the EIA/TIA standard of 100 meters (328 feet) remains unchanged.