The question anymore isn't whether or not to wireless, the question is which wireless to do. The much-awaited 802.11n standard is winding it's way through the acceptance process, clearing the political barriers as well as the technical ones, while UWB is finally being accepted by governments outside of the U.S.

This is just one sign of the movement of computing from the deskbound PC to mobile platforms in any number of forms and the slow but massive wave of ubiquitous computing. Wireless communications is a nice thing to have if you are using a laptop, but it is a critical piece of infrastructure for any number of embedded systems. It's getting to be hard to pick up a newspaper without seeing something else that is being built in terms of city infrastructure, consumer devices, or industrial applications that involves communicating smart devices that take advantage of a sea of connectivity.

Larry Mittag