Word: wirelesses
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...betrayed. Earlier this year, Barcelona, capital of the Spanish province, hosted the 3GSM World Congress, the world's biggest annual cellular conference. During his keynote address, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin implored his colleagues to improve cellular networks' ability to provide rapid and easy Internet access, otherwise a new wireless technology called WiMAX could take over. WiMAX doesn't require phone handsets or cellular networks. It can deliver fast Net connections over long distances directly to computers or handheld devices. "If we don't build our broadband networks we will have this opportunity taken away from us," Sarin warned...
Catalonia's announcement raised a series of pressing questions. Are governments or businesses the best entities to build wide-area wireless broadband networks? And what technology should those networks employ? Funded by citizens' tax dollars, governments generally look after roads, schools and defense. But telecoms? Haven't most governments been privatizing their fixed-line phone networks over the past 25 years? Why jump back into the same business? Wouldn't state-backed initiatives undermine free-market efforts to build networks and offer wireless services...
Apparently, many elected and appointed officials don't think so. Local and sometimes national governments around the world are not leaving matters to unfettered capitalism. Instead, some are investing public money or working to secure the corporate investment needed to build wireless Internet networks that use fledgling WiMAX technologies and, more often, mature wi-fi platforms. Singapore is "unwiring" using tax revenue. Macedonia is doing the same with the help of U.S. aid. Municipalities as diverse as Prague, Paris, Norwich, Dublin and Chicago are either building or attempting to build wireless networks with public funds...
...enabler for new opportunities, new businesses, and to attract new companies," says Yeng Kit Chan, head of Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority. "Without this new infrastructure Singapore would not have an edge over other locations." Late last year, Singapore said it would invest $20 million in a wireless project that will provide Internet access in public places such as parks, hotels and malls...
Coffee is far from Rwanda's only success. Its roads are some of the best in Africa, and the entire country will be wireless by the end of the year. Rwanda is also clean, thanks to a ban on plastic bags since 2005 and a mandatory national "tidy up" one afternoon each month, in which even government ministers clean the streets. Partly as a result, and partly because of careful rain-forest management and a mountain gorilla baby boom, Rwanda is also a growing eco-tourism destination. The government says the economy as a whole will grow 6.5% this year...