(FORTUNE Magazine) – Paul Saffo is a director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank whose clients include Nokia, Coca-Cola, and the U.S. Postal Service. He was interviewed by FORTUNE's Eric Nee.

Every advance on the Internet has been important for the reason people expected, but even more important for a reason nobody guessed at. When Arpanet was established [in 1969], it was intended to be time-sharing on steroids, to give you access to computing resources even if you weren't on a college campus. The thing that was a complete, total surprise was that e-mail became a vastly bigger deal. The original concept was access to computing; the surprise was that it was a community.

There are other examples, but if you jump ahead to the World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee, what Tim was trying to do was improve on the community part. Here a guy is trying to build this knowledge environment, and it is a big deal for that, but what was completely unexpected was that it was a commercial revolution.

The same thing's going to be true for broadband. Broadband is synonymous with fat bits and rich multimedia, but the really important surprise about broadband is not that. It's that it is always on. With a broadband line, you don't hang up. It's always leaking bits out on the Internet. People don't much notice that today because they still have off switches on their computers, but the moment you have a connection to the world that's not only rich but always on, the way you use it changes in profound ways. That's where the big change will be. We can talk about bits and bytes, dense-wave division multiplexing, and all that stuff, but the big thing is that there's a huge entrepreneurial opportunity.

We know people hate to wire their houses. It's hard, so they don't do it or they don't get around to it. But you can imagine a world where you bolt a box to that broadband pipe where it comes into your house, and some of it goes wireless from there to your computers, and other things go via cable to your television. You remember when we were kids, and when you did your homework, you'd spread out in the family room and take over the whole space? And then, ten years ago, when kids did their homework, they disappeared into their room and you never saw them again because they were on their computers? Well, now, all of a sudden, the kid's out in the middle of the family room because somebody cut the cord on the computer, and she now has wireless access, so she's back spreading her homework all over the floor with the laptop there as well.

The weirdest thing about the Web is the personal computer. Here we are, we've got this fabulous cyberspace, a whole new universe delivered to us, and where do we access that universe from? Exactly the place where we have been spending ever less of our time over the last two decades--our desks. The advent of broadband and always-on in the home is going to accelerate a species radiation of different kinds of information appliances.

We can sit here and talk about what can happen, but I can guarantee you that the Internet will end up surprising us all. It's a consistent thing in my business of forecasting that even the most expected of futures arrives late--and in completely unexpected ways.