APRIL 2001

I have always been a huge sceptic of the wireless internet. When Sprint PCS brought out its internet phones in the US last year, I was first in line, bought the handset, tried to navigate the data service to find a restaurant address, gave up in frustration, dialled directory inquiries and vowed never again to be taken in by the hype.

At Moreover, we always resisted wireless internet hype. But even we talked about possible extensions of our platform into wireless and other media, after an entrepreneur I respect said it would add 20% to the valuation. That moment of weakness made me despise the mobile internet even more.

Until now. I have become obsessed by a new technology with a geeky acronym. It’s spreading through Silicon Valley like wildfire; the technology promises to bring the high-speed internet the ‘last mile’ to the home; it renders questionable the $100 billion that telecoms companies have invested in third-generation mobile frequencies; and it shows even sceptics like me the potential of high-speed internet access without wires.

The technology is called 802.11b or Wi-fi, a standard for wireless communication within offices or homes. It operates at the speed of the ethernet networks on which most modern offices run – about 200 times the rate of a dial-up connection to the internet. And 802.11b networks let companies provide high-speed network access to employees without messy cabling.

But the technology has broader implications. First, 802.11b is suddenly the standard for wireless network access. Venture capitalists are investing in the 802.11b space. PC makers such as Toshiba and Dell are building 802.11b aerials into their high-end laptops.

Second, a new range of devices from companies such as D-Link attach a high-speed internet connection directly to an 802.11b transmitter. Think of it as an individual setting up their own high-speed internet cell, for the cost of a $300 mail-order device and a $30 per month DSL connection.

Third, users no longer need

to change machine settings when switching networks. Most new networks can now assign an identity to a laptop as it’s connected to the network, rather than requiring an address to be programmed in.

All these developments mean that a new laptop can be connected to the internet simply by moving within range of an 802.11b transmitter, without changing a computer’s settings.

Already, San Francisco’s technological hippies are using this new power to cast the internet across parts of the city, on the grounds that free access is now every American citizen’s inalienable right. Brewster Kahle, a visionary and an entrepreneur, provides high-speed wireless internet from a transmitter on his house in San Francisco’s Presidio park.

Companies are seizing the commercial opportunity. After buying an 802.11b card for $110, I have opened an account with a company called Airwave, which is setting up high-speed wireless access points in restaurants and cafés across San Francisco and Silicon Valley. If the access point is actually working – not always the case – I can surf the web as fast as in the office.

Even Buck’s, the famous restaurant down in Woodside where the elite Sand Hill Road venture capitalists go for lunch, is Airwave enabled. A fellow entrepreneur, about to embark bravely on a funding round, is getting an Airwave account just to do live demos while schmoozing potential investors.

And wireless internet access points are springing up all over the place. Starbucks plans to introduce 802.11b transmitters in most of its US outlets, and airlines are putting the facility in their departure lounges.

I am an enthusiast of this new technology partly because I am an enthusiast of most new technologies. And I like telling friends in the UK how I can do my e-mail at the laundry a few blocks from where I live. (I didn’t have any clothes to wash, but went there to show that one could e-mail from the laundry.)

But the thing that pleases me most about 802.11b is this: Silicon Valley has long been able to take a technology, pin a rocket to it and get it to escape velocity before the rest of the business world caught up. That was certainly the case with the internet itself, a medium born in Geneva and Illinois but brought up in Silicon Valley by firms such as Netscape and Yahoo!

Silicon Valley, so recently the fount of all new business knowledge, has lost a little of its confidence in the past year. But, as the mobile phone industry will find with the spread of 802.11b transmitters, Silicon Valley still has an extraordinary capacity to surprise the rest of the world. And that reminds me why I wanted to move here in the first place.