Net Net: Wi-Fi Gets Going

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Take a peek under your desk. See that snarl of cables, leads, paper clips and lost printouts cascading from the butt end of your PC? Well, etch the ugly sight into your memory for nostalgic reference. Computer cables are going the way of eight-tracks, pet rocks and typewriters. A wireless revolution is seeping into our homes, schools, offices and gathering points very quietly, and setting up what appears to be a face-off between two competing technical standards.

Dozens of institutions, from cafes to lumbering corporations, have already made it possible to link PCs and notebooks to the Internet without wires. If you have the right expansion card on your laptop, you can walk into a Starbucks in New York City today and, for a small fee, browse the Net over a high-priced cup of coffee. This revolution has also made its way into airport terminals and the homes of technophiles sick of tripping over cables.

The instigators of the revolution are two standards that allow machines to talk to one another, known as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b or, more popularly, Wi-Fi. Both connect gadgets cheaply by accessing a swath of free radio spectrum over which to exchange digital data. Bluetooth, named for a Viking king (one of its original backers is Sweden's Ericsson) and supported by some 2,500 companies that constitute the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, is basically a substitute for all those cables you now use to link peripheral devices, such as PDAs and printers, to other computerized devices. Chips up to 30 ft. apart built on the new standard can exchange audio and data at a rate of 500 to 1,000 kilobytes every second--more than 10 times as fast as your dial-up modem.

Wi-Fi transmits data 10 times that distance and at much more than 100 times the rate of a dial-up modem, making it an ideal technology for linking computers to one another and to the Net in a wireless local-area network, or WLAN. It also has the advantage of being unequivocally here and relatively easy to use. All you need is a specialized PC card (for as low as $90) that slips into a slot in your computer, and an access point or base station (available for less than $300) capable of linking several computers. The downside? Higher power means higher power consumption--which reduces a laptop's battery life drastically. "It's physics," says Jeff Calcagno, vice president of strategy and corporate development at Widcomm, Inc. "There's always going to be that basic trade-off." Another potentially serious problem is the inherent security risk associated with beaming data through the air.

Manufacturers hoping to boost a sagging PC market are racing to equip computers for wireless networking. "It's considered something of vast importance, given the economic slowdown," says International Data Corp. (IDC) analyst Jason Smolek. Compaq, Gateway and Dell are all selling computers with built-in wireless networking capabilities. IBM launched a top-line Wi-Fi equipped laptop named ThinkPad T23 in late July that offers enhanced security features. Apple, which virtually pioneered wireless home networking when it launched AirPort in 1999, is ahead of the pack. All its computers have been WLAN-ready since then.