Posted Sunday, April 6, 2003; 17:21 BST
There's no denying that Wi-Fi is catching on. More than 18 million shipments of Wi-Fi equipment were made last year, up 60% from 2001, and could double by 2006, according to technology research group In-Stat/MDR. The U.S. is still way ahead of Europe, partly because there are more laptop users in the U.S, but the gap is closing. Eventually, Europe could well drive Wi-Fi use over mobile phones, the tech toy of choice for Europeans.

The Wi-Fi phenomenon is relatively young, but the underlying technology dates back to World War II, when the avant-garde American composer George Antheil and the sultry Hollywood starlet Hedy Lamarr met at a dinner party. Antheil, an early proponent of "machine music," and Lamarr, an Austrian exile and passionate opponent of the Nazis, came up with an idea that would help protect radio-guided torpedoes from being jammed. Instead of using one signal to direct the missile, they invented "frequency hopping," which regularly changes the signal that guides a torpedo, thus making it impossible to jam — and paving the way for today's Wi-Fi networks, which operate on a similar principle.

Fast-forward to the Netherlands at the end of the 1980s. Engineers at NCR, a company owned by AT&T that made cash registers and atm machines, were trying to figure out a way to connect cash registers through a wireless network. They hoped to save department stores bundles of money by enabling managers to easily move registers around stores without the expense of repeatedly installing the wires necessary to connect them to the company's computers. The NCR unit that finally solved the problem eventually became Agere Systems, a spin-off of Lucent Technologies. The first Wi-Fi products were clunky PC cards that connected cash registers to company computers. Then, in 1999, Apple made a bet on Wi-Fi, equipping its laptops with receivers and launching the AirPort transmitter. Slowly, Wi-Fi began taking off.

	Instead of setting up isolated wireless hot spots, companies like Wan are building Wi-Fi 'zones,' or long-distance wireless networks. The largest has a radius of 12 km

Now the big guys are starting to pile in. Early last year, T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom's mobile arm, bought MobileStar Network, which operated 500 Wi-Fi hot spots in Starbucks coffee shops in the U.S. Other big carriers — France Télécom's Orange, Swisscom, Verizon Wireless, among others — are joining up too. Deutsche Telekom is taking its Wi-Fi strategy to Europe by wiring up Starbucks franchises and negotiating hot-spot deals in other key locations on the Continent. "Our plan in Europe is to set up Wi-Fi networks across our market in airport lounges, hotels, public spots, railway stations," says Nikesh Arora, chief marketing officer for T-Mobile International. T-Com, Deutsche Telekom's fixed-line business, is now selling €199 Wi-Fi kits for use in the home and by small businesses.

Wi-Fi could open up new possibilities in entertainment too. The PCs of today's rip-and-burn generation are chock-full of MP3s, videos and digital photographs. But the problem has always been moving music and video off the PC and onto the home entertainment system. Now firms like Hewlett-Packard and Philips have devices on the market that use Wi-Fi to connect computers with stereos and TVs. The systems aren't perfect, but they are improving rapidly. At 11 megabits per second (mbps), most home Wi-Fi networks are still too slow to beam video from the PC to a Wi-Fi receiver. The next step is 54 mbps, which will support streaming video.

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