MPR: Cutting the Cord

Cutting the Cord
By Jon Gordon, Minnesota Public Radio
March 2001

For some, wireless technologies hold the kind of promise once offered by the Internet itself. A host of companies are racing to find new ways of untying information from its wired moorings. The result: appliances like Web-ready cell phones, palm-top computers, and pocket-sized global positioning units. Whether on the job, at school, or at play, rising numbers of people are going mobile.

Rick Ehrlinspiel, is president and CEO of Surf and Sip, a company that is building little networks in cafes, hotels, and airports across the country. The company hopes to hook up several coffee shops in the Twin Cities later this year.

IT'S 10 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN SAN FRANCISCO, and inside the Crepe House Restaurant, Patrick Torre is nursing a a cup of coffee and killing time. He's out of a job; the Internet company he worked for went bust. So he's polishing his resume, surfing the Web and reading e-mail on his laptop - except there are no phone lines or cables connected to his computer. A wireless card inside his computer - an antenna, really - is picking up a high-speed connection the restaurant is beaming through the air. "It's really cool," Torre says. "Wireless with a laptop, it really works. It's just like being at your desk. You can do everything you can do with a wired computer, wirelessly."

Torre is logged on to a wireless network run by a new company called Surf and Sip, which is building little networks in cafes, hotels, and airports across the country. The company hopes to hook up several coffee shops in the Twin Cities later this year. Surf and Sip brings a high-speed Internet wire into a building, then beams a signal out as far as 300 feet. That enables computer users within that range to flip open their laptops and hop on the high-speed Internet almost instantly.

"We're trying to fill the void for Internet users to provide them with mobile Internet access. So they don't have to stay tethered to their house or tethered to their company.," says Rick Ehrlinspiel, Surf and Sip president and CEO.

The wireless phone industry is taking another tack entirely. It's betting you'll access the Internet from your cell phone. Only a relative handful of the 80 million mobile phone users in the United States are currently surfing the Web and sending e-mail from their Nokias, Ericssons and Motorolas. To lure more customers, firms are promising an information nirvana - news, stocks, and entertainment in the palm of your hand.

Les Wanninger, e-commerce expert at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, says in a couple of years, Minnesotans will conduct much of their routine business from cell phones.

"I think we'll be doing a lot of things like electronic payments on our mobile device. I'm going to be hooked in with the six companies I do business with a lot of times. And there will be a really simple way to get to them, like I push a "1" to get to my bank, I push "2" to get to my grocer if I'm ordering groceries," Wanninger says.

That may be coming, but for now the wireless Web isn't anything to get excited about.

"This is another example of the classic, gigantic overhype of everything new that the high-tech industry seems to thrive on. It's way overdone," says Walt Mossberg, the personal-technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He calls the wireless Web "pitiful," and says the experience of typing on a tiny phone keypad scrolling through information on little phones screens is "painfully slow, difficult to read, difficult to use, and endless navigation."

For a peek at where we may be heading, it's instructive to look to Japan and Scandinavia, where broad public acceptance of wireless technologies has come a lot more quickly than in this country.

Twelve-million Japanese - most of them youngsters - have flocked to a phone-based Internet service called I-Mode.

In wireless-crazy Scandinavia, using a phone to tap out short text messages is all the rage. Just ask Jari Parkkisenniemi, the chief technology officer of Finnish wireless company Yomi Vision.

"We have had these text-messaging services for three years now, and they are still the most popular services. Many of the youngsters have their mobile phones and they are sending messages like, 'Can we meet there?' and so on," says Parkkisenniemi.

Parkkisenniemi says many young Finns are so taken with the technology they ignore their parents and run up huge phone bills, causing family tensions. Parkkisenniemi is part of a contingent of Scandinavian wireless experts coming to a University of Minnesota conference on the state of wireless commerce.

Why more people use their cell phones for messaging and accessing the Internet in parts of Asia and Europe is complicated. For one thing, the United States never set a single technical standard for wireless phones. That created competing products and networks that have slowed things down. Also, Americans seem wedded to the Internet on personal computers, with their big screens and keyboards.

Europe could well stay ahead of the United States for years, because companies there are investing more in the next generation of wireless networks, known as 3G, short for third generation. 3G promises to bring people ultra-fast Internet, video and music on their mobile phones.

3G is supposed to arrive in Europe in about a year, maybe a couple years later in the U.S. Jeff Quiram of Minnetonka-based ADC Telecommunications says it's OK to let others lead the way. "If there's any advantage in being a little late to the 3G party, it is that they'll be doing a lot of their learning on somebody else's turf," he says. "So I think we're going to learn a lot of lessons from Europe that will give us some real insights on how best to design these networks and how to roll them out."

As they develop 3G, companies are dreaming up other new ways for using wireless devices. "Location technology" will be in all mobile phones, so your handset will know where you are at all times. That could bring help more quickly, if you get sick while out and about, or have a car accident, but it could also mean less privacy.

Also on the horizon: disposable mobile phones. A company called Telespree will sell a handset that you toss in the garbage can when your prepaid time is gone.

Sony plans to sell Play Station games for mobile phones. Handheld organizers like Palm Pilots are sprouting telephone functions, and cell phones are starting to offer built in organizers. But it's not clear most consumers want to use their mobile phones for anything else except talking.

Robbie Blinkoff, an anthropologist who just completed a study on wireless users, says widespread adoption of wireless technologies could have a real social cost.

"People have a fear about wireless, and the fear is they will be overloaded with information; that, somehow, some person or some company has made it possible for you to be connected to every single thing its seems at the same time," Blinkoff says.

The wireless industry has other barriers to knock down, including the fear that mobile phones may strip us of what little privacy we have left.

Cutting the Cord | Wireless' Lab Rats | The Wireless Tether | Rural Minnesota's Place in the Wireless Derby | A Delicate Balance | Home

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