It's certainly any interesting concept with some merit.
However it would change the game from being "damn I can't get any signal, no internet for me but I can still work offline" to "no signal, I literally can't do any computing at all!"
So what I could see happening is people at that point carrying around "personal compute servers" with them for just such an event, or at least having on in their home/office.
Also bear in mind that CPUs/GPUs appear to be getting pretty cheap as well as pretty small and you would need one anyway to do the video decompression so having something on your device capable of doing the basic UI etc isn't much of a stretch.
Perhaps you end up with 3 tiers of processing, i.e your device, your local node and "the cloud" (i.e a proper datacenter). The issue is making all of this transparent from a usability perspective.
Oh, I don't think we'll ever return to actual dumb terminals - I think the difference will be that some services will be available and others won't. Or some others will just be scheduled until you get near a basestation.
So what I could see happening is people at that point carrying around "personal compute servers" with them for just such an event, or at least having on in their home/office.
Also bear in mind that CPUs/GPUs appear to be getting pretty cheap as well as pretty small and you would need one anyway to do the video decompression so having something on your device capable of doing the basic UI etc isn't much of a stretch.
Perhaps you end up with 3 tiers of processing, i.e your device, your local node and "the cloud" (i.e a proper datacenter). The issue is making all of this transparent from a usability perspective.