Transatlantic Cable: Net access (and coffee) to go

Confession time: you might picture me writing this in some plush office overlooking the Golden Gate bridge while flunkies cater to my every whim - but that's not quite how it is. I'm writing this sitting in a café near Haight St while a rather taciturn looking young man with a spike through his nose brings me coffee. Because, you see, for the past few weeks I've been experimenting with the mobile lifestyle, thanks to my new wireless modem.

It's pretty damn cool - produced by a Palo Alto company called Metricom (which also runs the wireless service, Ricochet), it plugs into my laptop and gives me Internet access wherever I happen to be (as long as I'm in the coverage area) at the same speed as a 28K modem.

I've been testing it around town recently (purely for the purposes of this column, you understand), enabling me to send and receive email while testing out the coffee quality all over the city. I'm pleased to report that both the coffee and the Net access are generally excellent.

But despite this, the US seems to have ignored the most obvious way to access the Net on the move: the mobile phone network. I first arrived in the US in May of '99 and one of the first things I did was to get a new mobile. I assumed that I'd be able to use it to access the Net in the same way that I'd used my Orange mobile in the UK.

But when I asked the sales person about this, he looked at me like I'd just asked him if it could do the washing up as well. "You can't do that here," the salesman told me. "They've been talking about it for years, but nobody offers it as a service yet."

Since then, one company (Sprint PCS) has started offering Net access as an additional service, but it is (so far) the only one doing so. So we have the odd situation where there are more mobile phone networks and companies than you can shake a stick at, but only one that offers Net access. And when I asked the PR person at one network if they were going to be supporting WAP, I was greeted by that silence that roughly translates as "I have no idea what that means, but I'm not going to admit that."

It's not that mobile phones aren't popular - the CITA (the wireless trade body) now estimates that one in three adults owns a mobile phone, giving a total of around 76 million in the US. A big part of the problem is that these phones are mainly still analogue. I know people in the UK that have had a Nokia 9000 communicator for several years, but they've only just come out over here and are being viewed as the next cool gadget.

Even Wired Magazine (normally a great believer in the fact that the future is being invented down the road from them) had to admit in a recent feature on Nokia that it was in Europe, not the US, that the future of mobile communications was being created.

But this does all look likely to change - Microsoft's recently announced partnership with Ericsson should start producing phones that can speak WAP in 2001, and the other mobile phone networks are likely to follow the lead of SprintPCS and start offering Net access soon. No doubt they will be rolling out things like WAP support shortly afterwards.

But whatever they do, they are still going to be several years behind Europe, where these things are already available...

Ironically enough, the mobile Net access services that are on offer in the US are very good: the Ricochet network (the one I use) is pretty fast and reliable, and there is pretty wide coverage from the various data networks that use the CDPD standard. And don't forget the increasingly popular Palm VII, which includes a wireless data modem for sending and receiving email. These products are cool, but it's just that they haven't taken the obvious step of integrating them into the mobile phone network...

Well, that's me done for the day. Time to move on to a new café and see what the reception is like there. Oh what the hell - could I have more coffee, please? And please watch what you're doing with that spike this time...