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Fourteen months ago, after mulling a list of defunct Wi-Fi start-ups, Schell brought AT&T, IBM and Intel together to discuss a jointly funded $30 million Wi-Fi network blanketing 50 U.S. metropolitan areas. He dubbed the venture Project Rainbow. Each side could see the benefit: IBM sold approximately $1 billion in Wi-Fi services in 2002, Intel was looking for a way to get into the wireless chip game, and AT&T provided the communications backbone for 8 million road warriors. But as IBM's representative John Boutross remembers, the talks were initially very static: "These large...
...hurdle is the technology's simplicity, and the ease with which anyone can provide it. Ignore the geeks who use Wi-Fi's painful official designation, 802.11. Here's a more familiar name for the technology: radio. The Wi-Fi card in your laptop is a receiver, and the Wi-Fi router--which plugs into a cable or DSL modem at your home or office or coffee shop--is nothing more than a short-range transmitter-receiver. (Here's a piece of trivia for your next cocktail party: the patent on which Wi-Fi technology is based was filed back...
...range of transmission is usually 150 ft. to 300 ft., which makes Wi-Fi ideal for home use. It also works in most workplace settings. Shipping companies were the first to see the value of Wi-Fi in warehouses; FedEx estimates its Wi-Fi-enabled workers are 30% more productive since they've been unleashed. Hospitals and college campuses came next. Today 57% of all U.S. corporations, including all of the FORTUNE 1,000, have at least a small-scale Wi-Fi network, although only a few tech-savvy firms like Qualcomm and Novell have so far dared to roll...
That goes double for road warriors, the real source of potential wealth in the wider Wi-Fi world. These are the field sales reps, insurance adjusters, real estate agents and delivery managers. There are more than 11 million road warriors in the U.S. alone who regularly dial in remotely to corporate networks, and 90% of them are using slow-as-mud 56K modems via standard phone lines. The advantage of untethering office workers is relatively unproved (Won't they just instant message one another during meetings?), but even the most technophobic CEO can imagine the benefit of her top salesman...
Enter Larry Brilliant, who had been doing a little consulting for Intel. Brilliant knew the benefits and pitfalls of Wi-Fi, and he was accustomed to working with start-ups. (In the years since the Well, Brilliant had created 14 networks including his own failed Wi-Fi company, AirZone.) The pace of the discussion frustrated him. "It was harder to negotiate a treaty between these three elephants than between India and Pakistan," he says. Brilliant should know. He once brokered a subcontinental smallpox treaty in six weeks. Talks among Project Rainbow's founders over the nondisclosure agreement alone dragged...