Bob Brewin

Service technicians for The Pepsi Bottling Group in the U.S. used to generate three million pieces of paper per year while making routine repairs to soda fountains and vending machines. But after a year-long roll-out of wireless handheld computers, that paper mountain has completely disappeared.

Technicians at Coca-Cola Bottling handle about a quarter of a million repair calls a year for coolers, vending machines and fountain syrup dispensers and had grown increasingly frustrated with their old, DOS-based handheld computers with hard-to-read black-and-white screens.

FedEx Corp. has signed a five-year deal to use AT&T Wireless Services Inc.'s next-generation mobile data network to support new, high-bandwidth applications to be used by its 40,000 couriers.

U.S. government agencies and commercial critical infrastructure providers such as utilities and railroads believe enhanced national security requirements following last year's terrorist attacks should serve as a litmus test of any reallocation of limited radio frequency spectrum resources.

Two start-up satellite pay-radio operators have asked the U.S. FCC to sharply limit emissions from wireless LANs, Bluetooth short-range wireless devices and fixed wireless systems that operate in the unlicensed 2.4GHz band.

FedEx has signed a five-year deal to use AT&T Wireless Services

Sandia National Laboratories has begun testing wireless LANs to determine whether they can meet the kind of rigorous security required for any U.S. Department of Energy facility.

Concerns about security have commercial and government enterprises moving quickly to reassess deployments of industry-standard wireless LANs. Experts say the security flaws are a potentially severe threat to networked systems within the nation's critical infrastructure.