"In Europe, however, voice capacity may drive 3G. Within six to 12 months, carriers might see capacity reach critical levels for GSM systems. So that might keep 3G from dying there," Chand said. "In the U.S., carriers are not so badly off from a capacity standpoint. They are still just experimenting with data, and I see the 2.5G technologies lasting for quite a bit of time.". Williams sees things differently. "I don't think we'll have a capacity issue," he said. "In many areas, some carriers have half or even less capacity than other players do, and it really isn't a problem. So I don't think spectrum will be a big deal.".

The long-term question, Chand noted, "is will there someday be rich media applications that are compelling enough for that kind of system? whatever bitches ja huss iphone case There's just no market visibility right now, It's a matter of whether or not one believes in the mobility of information technology.", To read more articles like this one, visit Knowledge@Wharton, All materials copyright © 2002 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Third-generation wireless technology could be a waste of money for governments, carriers, consumers and applications developers, Wharton experts say..

CNET también está disponible en español. Don't show this again. Pass-One was created partly out of frustration over the time it was taking for WECA to make its decisions, said Sean O'Mahony, chief executive of FatPort, a provider of wireless Internet access in Canada, and one of Pass-One's founding members. "The battle is about seamless roaming, otherwise Wi-Fi is just building hundreds of thousands of little islands around the world," he said. A WECA representative declined to comment on the group's view of how the roaming standard should work.

A home where Wi-Fi can roamRoaming is now a major focus for the wireless networking industry because of the growing number of cafes, hotels and airport lounges where people can pay a small fee for a day's worth of wireless Internet access, But so far it's a fragmented group of about 1,200 locations, which is expected whatever bitches ja huss iphone case to grow to about 42,000 by 2006, according to statistics from research firm In-Stat/MDR, Complicating the matter is the creation of wireless Internet service providers like Boingo Wireless and Sputnik, These companies have crafted partnerships with most of the public hot spots in the United States, But because there is no roaming standard, a Boingo Wireless subscriber can't roam onto a Sputnik network..

The problem is similar to the early days of cell phones, when there were no roaming agreements, making for limited areas of cell phone coverage for every carrier. But a decade's worth of work crafting roaming agreements and roaming standards now makes it possible for any cell phone to call any other cell phones. The standards for Wi-Fi--also known as 802.11b--that are being worked on would provide a single way to do the complex task of letting someone log on to a rival host's network then get billed appropriately. The difficulties aren't necessarily of a technical nature, although that is, of course, present. Mainly, it's deciding how to share the revenue.