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Kids watching the new Star Wars films may think movies were always like this, because so many are like them now. But Lucas' first Jedi epic was, in its way, revolutionary. It established sci-fi as a hot genre and teen boys as an audience that made hits by buying tickets early and often. It spurred the toy industry with its synoptic range of characters. "Star Wars was so 'toyetic,'" says Brad Globe, merchandising executive at DreamWorks. "It wasn't just one character or one vehicle; it was a whole world that was created, then extended through each movie...
Capabilities like this have driven the Wi-Fi equipment market to staggering growth, with unit 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...
...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 up to this hybrid model; Nokia recently announced a PC card offering both...
...Charles Golvin of Forrester Research says the driving force behind the Wi-Fi nation will not be 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...
...days later, I get an e-mail from Frank Keeney, who operates NAN No. 2. He asks if I was able to find it. Nope, I write back. He sends a reply that says a lot about the state of Wi-Fi today: "If you'd gone about 100 feet down the road, you would have...