Catherine Middleton, a communications researcher at associate professor in Ted Rogers School of Information Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, said that while there is a real sense of huge potential, there aren't yet many tangible applications, in part because aren't gigabyte networks to support them on.

There are gigabit networks here and there in the U.S. but no broad deployments, said Middleton. Developing the applications for gigabit networks, as well as the business models will take a long time, she added.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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