Guy Kewney

So, can Cannes cope with the GSM World Congress? Im off to the Cote dAzur. Its my duty. Its time to go to Europes biggest wireless show, set, as always, in one of Europes smaller conference venues: the Palais des Festivals et des Congrés, in Cannes, in the South of France. Its the venue that […]

The scene: An enterprising U.K. businessman sets up a taxi service and a shortwave radio station to communicate with his drivers. A rival instantly sets up a pirate station on the same frequency, jamming the taxi calls with rock music. Youre a wireless policeman: What do you do here? Naturally, the taxi service reported this […]

It comes as no surprise that Motorola launched Canopy, its next-generation high-speed wireless broadband system, in Europe 30 months after it first shipped in North America. What is remarkable is the fact that Motorola hasnt joined Intel on the WiMax bandwagon with Canopy. Canopy has been delayed from European markets by spectrum regulations for reasons […]

Its probably time to admit it: 3G wireless is like satellite. It will never be economical as a broadband solution. Five years is a long time to wait and now that 3G wireless is here, youd think wed be grateful. Not a chance of that! We want its successor on schedule, please. The concept of […]

Its a shameful thing. I dont know how to admit it. Im not wirelessly connected. OK, now that you know the worst, Ill make some excuses. First of all, I am writing from a place that is really the back of beyond. If I had a broadband connection, Id send you a picture. Its the […]

Linksys asked me to talk about “the future of wireless” for its annual sales convention. I ended up talking about advertising. Actually, its a mystery to me why the Cisco company wanted a European to talk to its sales staff in Irvine, Calif. At first, I thought it was the conspicuous spending. You know: “Were […]

The only thing that could make you look smarter than being able to operate a VCR is being able to set up a mobile conference call. Conference calls, of course, are the application nobody thinks is worth having. Theres a reason for that: Theyre wretchedly difficult to organize. Lets say youre at a football game […]

The first thing you suspect when your PC starts crawling is a virus or spyware. Not radio congestion. Ive been running spyware blockers. Its congestion, however, that is going to be the nemesis of wireless networking. And the problem may strike first in Europes jammed urban districts before it hits the more spaced out North […]

I havent heard the bulletins out of Geneva, but if they say “sweetness and light” on UWB, Ill put my money on “wishful thinking”. The word on the street is that ultra wideband wireless is more likely to become a Bluetooth standard than a generally accepted PAN (personal area network) alternative proposed by anybody else. […]

Youre thinking of investing in a mass-market GPRS data project? Let me show you an old sepia-tint photograph. The photograph isnt of an early portable phone. Its of a street in North London—actually, the street where my wife grew up. It shows Crouch End Broadway, if you really want to look it up. There is […]

Perhaps the organizers of the Wireless World Summit in London were a bit overambitious but they did, honestly, try to attract the people who mattered. So who do you think was missing? It wasnt the mobile operators. They were there: T-Mobile, Hutchison “3,” mmO2, and BT Mobile, for example—and were talking CEO-level delegates. Nor were […]

Its the latency, not the speed. But lack of speed kills, too. Can we go faster? The fatal accident looming on the old superhighway—if they dont find something magic to do about it—will be the 3G (third-generation) phone networks. At the recent UMTS show in London, the presentation that caught my attention was a “speed […]