Word: wi
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Most people who use Wi-Fi today do so in institutional settings such as schools and businesses and via a handful of pay networks that serve hotels, cafes, airports and convention centers. The benefits are obvious to the traveling exec who logs on to his corporate network from an airport lounge, downloads the latest revision of a huge PowerPoint file and arrives fresh and unmussed at his presentation...
...Wi-Fi is handy around the hometown as well. Tim Bajarin, president of the tech consultancy Creative Strategies, frequently finds himself strapped for time, unable to get back to the office between meetings. "So when I know I've got a 45-minute break, I head to Starbucks," he says. "I log on, check my e-mail, come up to speed on information that I need and head off to my next meeting...
Capabilities like this have driven the Wi-Fi equipment market to staggering growth, with unit shipments of home and business hardware climbing 319% in 2001, according to the research firm In-Stat/MDR. More than 19 million Americans are expected to use Wi-Fi by 2006. That growth, real and projected, has moved techies to imagine a magic, seamless, nationwide carpet of high-speed wireless access, available to all and as ubiquitous...
...telcos have been pushing their own upcoming wireless-data services, generically known as 3G (third generation) and--perhaps more realistically in the near term--2.5G. Such services already are popular in Europe and Japan. The smart money has the national wireless infrastructure shaping up as a hybrid of Wi-Fi and 2.5G or 3G, with Wi-Fi offering high speeds at low or no cost over very small areas and the Gs covering wide areas at lower speeds and relatively high cost. Hardware is catching up to this hybrid model; Nokia recently announced a PC card offering both...
...Charles Golvin of Forrester Research says the driving force behind the Wi-Fi nation will not be hardware: "The more important part is, What is the service provider offering you? Can you get one bill that encompasses all the services you use, no matter where you go?" Ease of use and ubiquity, in other words--or something close to it--are the grails of the wireless world, just as they were in the early days of the Internet. "I always had this view as I was building EarthLink," Dayton says. "Why should I have to be near a plug...