There was a time when you could easily count all the men in the country who even pretended to know anything about wireless. No one of the few who were working with wireless then, knew whether a set carefully put together would work at all or how far the signals could be heard. Transmissions of a hundred miles or more were hailed as remarkable. Present-day radio listeners are quite prone to think of radio as nothing more than telephonic broadcasting. But before the wireless telephone, came tremendous amounts of hard, sometimes discouraging, but always fascinating and essentially romantic work. Wireless first startled the world’s fair in 1904. At that time there was, of course, no ra

HomeRF is the banner name for a group of manufacturers that formed in 1998 to develop a standard for the wireless interconnection of homePCs and electronic devices. Most key supporters of HomeRF have now deployed 802.11b solutions and support for HomeRF has dwindled along with a declining market share.

In reviewing who the “big players” are in the U.S. wireless market, the first thing one notices is that three of the top four companies all have their roots in the original American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Those three wireless service providers are: Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless. The other major player in the U.S. wireless market is Sprint PCS with roots in the Brown Telephone Company which, coincidentally, was an early competitor to AT&T. The other interesting things to note about all of these major wireless providers is that each of them has grown from a multitude of mergers and acquisitions. Other than Sprint PCS all were spawned from the break-up of the Baby Bells back in 1984 and re-constituted again with the merging of some of those same Baby Bells. One last item of note is how the Telecommunication Act of 1996 both create the synergies and need for many of the merger activities and at the same time, created a new competitive environment for some of the already established wireless companies. Following is a brief history of the three companies, Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS and Cingular Wireless, which now dominate the U.S. Wireless market. AT&T was omitted from this list as its history has been documented in the section of this paper that explains the overall history of wireless communication.

Some topics in this essay:
Gartner G2, Wireless History, Bell Atlantic, Lee Deloitte, GSM Association, Cingular Wireless, Industry Leaders, President CEOs, Baltimore/Washington DC, Interconnectivity Bluetooth,  wap, sprint pcs, wireless communications, 24 ghz, mobile base, bell atlantic, data rates, wireless market, cingular wireless, wireless technology, 24 ghz band, rates 54 mbps, base base mobile, mobile base base, mhz mobile base,