Word: wirelessed
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...Best Western Gateway is one of two public "hot spots" listed for Santa Monica in the directory of Boingo Wireless, which offers Wi-Fi access in locations scattered across the country. I have already talked to a preternaturally cheerful customer-service rep and signed up for Boingo, which has a wireless transmitter in the hotel lobby. So I'm ready for action...
...insert my credit card-size Wi-Fi receiver into the PC-card slot of my laptop. The "sniffer" software then checks the air for wireless signals, and a message pops up: "The Boingo Wireless signal is available. Would you like to connect?" A click on the trackpad and I'm online. As my home page loads, I'm tempted to pass my hands over my computer like a magician's assistant: Look, no wires! I access a website that lets me benchmark my download speed; it clocks in at 2,920 kbps, comparable to my home cable-modem connection...
...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...
Waiting in the wings, though, are the big wireless-phone companies. The 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...
...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? Why shouldn't the Internet just be present at all times where...