Strung out on Wireless New York NY

Posted by : Nelson King

So far, this has been regarded as a rough winter. It's actually closer to normal, whatever that means. It's rough enough if you're caught traversing a freeway in near-whiteout conditions. That's when the combination of snow and wind make it impossible to see beyond the length of your headlights, even in the day. It's also when a palm-sized computer and its antenna fail to make a permanent connection with the Internet. My friend Doug flipped the cover back over his machine in disgust. "All I wanted was a weather update," he said. After a moment I said, "You can see the weather; it's right out there. What I can't see is other cars, and for that a weather update means nothing."

Five days before Christmas, computer stocks are taking yet another bath. Yesterday Nasdaq was down another 7 percent from the day before. Seldom has an industry so conspicuously needed something to pull it out of a dizzying downward spin: some good news, some burgeoning technology with potential so great that it can't be denied.

As the dot-com Web sites go dark all over the Net and e-commerce hit its angst-filled adolescence, wireless seems to have been cast in the role of savior. Fortunately wireless is many things. It describes a convergence of communications and computer industries, most specifically telephones and Internet computing. These areas of technology are broadly defined so that wireless encompasses many products and thereby can power an industry i...

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