Here's what Steve Forbes has to say about Wireless:
"Wireless really does represent the sleeping giant of Wall Street. It's the next significant opportunity to turn $25,000 or $50,000 into a million while you still have time to enjoy it."
Welcome to the Wireless Economy
For the past 16 months, investors who have followed our advice have reaped huge rewards by capitalizing on the greatest investment trend of our times. We're talking about long-term wealth building. Forbes Wireless Stock Watch is about smart, informed investing in superbly run, dynamic, innovative, cutting-edge wireless-related companies.
Three Golden Rules for Building Your New Wireless Wealth:
Golden Rule #1: Buy companies that are building the infrastructure of the wireless economy. Here's why. By owning the companies that control the transceivers, base stations and transmission towers now, you will place yourself in the enviable position of being a "toll collector" of the wireless economy and grow richer with every wireless phone call, email, page, instant message, and more.
Golden Rule #2: Buy companies that are growing their customer base 15% to 20% every quarter. The reason: With thousands of wireless companies slugging it out to build their brand name and establish their technology, companies that can dominate their market and build market share will win the battle for customers and profits.
Golden Rule #3: Buy companies that reap huge profits from licensing their wireless technologies. You see, owning these companies is like owning the rights to a hit song you wrote once-yet get paid not only every time you sell a CD but also every time your song is played on the radio.
Forbes article
This Forbes article is about what Corridor is getting started in.
Forbes Magazine The Great Wi-Fi Hope
Bold hackers with "junk" spectrum may revive high tech, reaping the next round of big bucks.
Dayton is always looking for what's next in tech. In 1994, when he was all of 22, he started reselling Internet access leased from a big backbone operator named Uunet. The company he founded, EarthLink, still thrives today as the number three Internet service provider. His 3.2% stake is worth $42 million.
Now Dayton is eyeing the next revolution, a wireless gold rush so bold and sweeping that it inspires rapture in even hardened Silicon Valley veterans. Best known for its engineering spec--802.11 ("eight-oh-two-dot-eleven")--and the nickname Wi-fi (for wireless fidelity), it offers lightning-fast data links around the home, in the office and across a neighborhood and beyond.
The Wi-fi wave has already linked up an estimated 10 million laptops, Palm handhelds and other gadgets in hundreds of small, extremely local wireless networks. Some of these are commercial--one firm put them in several hundred Starbucks coffee shops. Many others are "freenets," access points provided gratis by 802.11 devotees who are, in essence, seeding the business. Mesh enough of these networks together and you have a mini-Net free of the phone and cable monopolies that control the "last mile" of wiring into your house. That's why 802 threatens them the most.
This revolution promises to offer new things we didn't even know we wanted, from instant video on your laptop in an airport lounge (10% of the 30 million laptops sold worldwide in 2001 are 802-ready) to a peek through every TV camera at a football game. Schools and hospitals can build their own networks, shipping sound and video across the room at up to 11 million bits per second, 196 times as fast as a PC modem.
"This is the next frontier," says Dayton, who in late 2000 founded a new firm, Boingo, to offer 802 access. It is, in short, just what the depressed denizens of Silicon Valley need most. The Nasdaq has begun its third year of declines. Some $1 trillion in value has vanished in telecom alone, a number so big that few investors are unscathed. It has been hard to find hope--until now. The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, an industry group with members like Intel and Cisco, says that worldwide sales of Wi-fi equipment will reach $5 billion by 2005. Sales were $1.5 billion last year.
The Wi-fi wave arose in stealth in the past few years, with none of the usual proclamations by industry analysts or promises from big companies. It was nurtured by thousands of programmers working in the netherworld of "junk" spectrum, a narrow stitch of free bandwidth set aside by the Federal Communications Commission for things like microwave ovens and streetlamps.
Cellular service typically uses a central swath of spectrum that is heavily regulated and highly priced; telecom titans had to pay billions for federal licenses and invest billions more to erect their networks. The 802 spectrum, by contrast, comes free of charge and is largely unregulated by the FCC, and the gear costs thousands of dollars, not millions.
That's why Wi-fi is catching on like a prairie fire. Dozens of startups are working on the building blocks that will let this new wave proliferate. Venture capitalists see a spate of new investment prospects. Even telecom incumbents--the fat and unhappy titans vulnerable to an 802 uprising--are placing bets on the Wi-fi threat. Intel has committed several hundred million dollars to Wi-fi, Sony has plans to put it in every TV set and PC it sells in Japan and Microsoft plans a fall debut for Mira, a wireless computer pad with an 802 linkup to the Web. "This is huge," says Saltzman, a senior director at Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people). "It's one of the fundamental technologies, limited only by people's creativity." In 30 months Intel has slashed Wi-fi chip prices by 82% and boosted throughput by 5,400%--better gains than it scored in PC chips.
At Boingo, Sky Dayton's new outfit, engineers are helping to roll out dozens of "hot spots," uplink points in neighborhoods, airports, hotels and coffee shops, tying together chaotic freenets and traditional office networks to form giant wireless systems. In Boingo's first two weeks of operation, Dayton brought on 500 low-power sites spread throughout the U.S. at sites like New York's Four Seasons Hotel. He plans to encompass 5,000 in his network by year-end. Boingo's $25-to-$75 monthly package includes a software "sniffer" that checks the air for nearby hot spots. If it finds one, the software identifies whether it is a freenet or an office network and decides whether the user is allowed access. If the access-point owner has affiliated with Boingo, the user is instantly connected, and the owner is paid a fee. Corporations can use encryption and firewalls to keep strangers out.
Dayton started Boingo at the end of 2000, after he put an access point up in his house and got instant broadband, anywhere at home. "The moment it was on, I realized it would take in every house, every business," he recalls. At a tech conference in Aspen, Colo. early last year Dayton was about to dial in to EarthLink, but turned his sniffer on for a lark. To his amazement it offered four different networks he could access from his hotel room. Turning his back on his own ISP, Dayton went wireless. Then he started working on his new business.
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