Thus He Spoke, and Mercury, Guide and Guardian, Visions and Views the Wireless World Web

slayer of Argus, did as he was told. Forthwith he bound on his glittering golden sandals with which he could fly like the wind over land and sea … he swooped down through the firmament till he reached the level of the sea, whose waves he skimmed like a cormorant that flies fishing every hole and corner of the ocean, and drenching its thick plumage in the spray. T echnologies developed during the last decade have undoubtedly changed the face of the computing world. The Internet explosion and the progress in network operation and deployment have made the single, isolated computer completely obsolete. The device of tomorrow will be neither the portable computer we now have nor the mobile phone we use every day, but a combination of the two, fitting in a child's palm and perpetually connected to the whole world. Recent studies indicate that handheld sales are booming in Europe and in the United States. Since 1996, when it released its first Palm Pilot, Palm Inc. has increased its sales by 65 percent annually. Its sales are expected to surpass $1 billion by the end of the current fiscal year. According to a Business Week study, 3 million Japanese users signed up for Net phones in just seven months during 1999. While customers increasingly become accustomed to mobility and handheld devices, the phones get smarter. I believe that this situation is the embryo of a new technology para-digm—an all-wireless revolution—where mobility is a given, and convergence between wireless and computing is a driving force. The need for geographical freedom has prompted discussions about mobile protocols and a mobile Internet infrastructure. The mobile IP (Internet protocol) working group hosted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has worked actively since 1996 on defining an alternative to mobile IP through a routing support allowing IP nodes to roam seamlessly among IP subnetworks while using either IPv4 or IPv6. On the user side, along with the widespread use of mobile phones, products like the Palm Pilot or the Epoc-based Symbian communicators challenge the limits of hardware integration. For the toolbox of the next decade, IT engineers will include the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), 1 Bluetooth, 2 and Epoc. The outcome of the current gestation will unveil new shapes as well as new potentialities. In particular, enhanced multimedia capabilities—for video acquisition as much as rendering—represent the next step of this technological procession. …