Mark,
At November's ITU meeting in Helsinki, the global telecom body approved specs for a unified digital wireless standard:
International Mobile Telephony 2000. If implemented, the new standard would facilitate borderless phones with cellular videoconferencing,email,web browsing, and other screen perks once the sole domain of PC's. The upgrade itself is technically straightforward, but coordinating federal and international regulatory agencies, service providers, equipment manufactures, and an estimated 470 million mobile-browsing phones promises to be a monumental task. In the meantime, Web-browsing phones are starting to take off over existing standards. Of course, today's Web without wires isn't worldwide: Our current Cell's won't work anywhere with incompatible standards. But at least here in the North America, we can at long last shop Amazon.com while we're stuck in traffic. |
