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Inventing the Internet Again

Sorry, though, Nokia, your model 9000, which comes closest today to this new machine, will not cut it, at least in the United States, because it is based on Europe’s increasingly obsolescent GSM standard. Also offering the right form factor but the wrong access standard is the IBM- BellSouth Simon, which is based on the U.S. analog cellular system (AMPS) or CDPD (cellular digital packet data). The most common PC will not be a GSM or CDPD device, because it will soon need to provide bandwidth on demand while draining the lowest possible power, whenever it is not plugged in. Thus the first PC of the new paradigm will probably have to be CDMA, built from the bottom up to provide bandwidth on demand, according to TCP/IP Internet standards, at a handful of milliwatts of communications power.

Among the companies soon to supply such machines, resembling the popular U.S. Robotics Pilot, are Sony, Qualcomm, Lucky-Goldstar, and Samsung. In cooperation with Alcatel, the European giant, which has just announced a CDMA program, Qualcomm base stations will soon contain a GSM link that can allow such CDMA dataphones to tie seamlessly to GSM systems in Europe. This will permit European carriers to use CDMA to expand capacity without jeopardizing their GSM customers.

Inspiring the Baran vision of wireless is the spectronic paradigm, in which most of the industry, from personal computers to cellular phones, moves on into the microwaves and is discussed more in terms of megahertz and gigahertz than in the usual metrics of mips and bits. The spectronic paradigm tends to favor the manufacturers of gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, and silicon germanium devices. Even as Philips and other firms push silicon bipolar chips toward microwave frequencies, the industry will move to higher domains of spectrum where gallium arsenide and indium phosphide tend to prevail. For the power amplifiers needed in every cell phone, gallium arsenide is superior to all the silicon variants. Pushed by the advance of the spectronics paradigm, the current ride of Vitesse, Anadigics, TriQuint, and other gallium arsenide innovators is likely to continue.

The major long-term winner is silicon germanium. Pioneered by IBM fellow Bernard Meyerson and tested and sampled by Analog Devices, silicon germanium combines much of the manufacturability of silicon with the high-frequency operation of gallium arsenide. IBM has recently contracted with Hughes’s communications division to develop silicon germanium microwave devices.

As the technology advances, the broadband radios will be ideal to offer video teleconferencing, World Wide Web, and other image-rich wireless content, including CDMA bandwidth on demand. Data, not voice, will be the critical application. As people brandish their dataphones around the globe, linking to convenient displays through IR connectors, users can break out into a tetherless telecosm where they can work or play, study or pray, anywhere they go.

A major supplier of wireless in Third World countries may be NextWave, the aggressive CDMA vendor for PCS, now preparing an IPO. As a “carrier’s carrier” providing only infrastructure and network services and leaving the sales and marketing to the locals, NextWave will join its complementary sister company in space, Globalstar, at the heart of a CDMA fabric of culture-independent worldwide communications. Watch Motorola’s obsolescent Iridium, with its exclusive spectrum requirements and its effort to bypass all local infrastructure, sink like a stone.

The new paradigm of wireless joins Baran’s two key inspirations-Internet and smart radio-to burst the chains of geography. People who want leading-edge computers and communications can get them wherever they may live. Using Globalstar, Teledesic, and other low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite systems that will be available as the smart radios roll out, students in the Third World can study or work in the First World. Teachers and entrepreneurs in the First World can serve and employ people around the globe. Imagined gaps between the information rich and poor will collapse in an infoscape equally accessible to all.

Baran has not spent his life in speculation or prophecy. Living at the heart of Silicon Valley in a walled and radiantly flowered community a few minutes down Middlefield Road from Netscape, Baran sits at the epicenter of a series of entrepreneurial creations. His home-office PCS and Power Macs are linked to the Internet through the Palo Alto Cable Co-op by cable modems from Com21, which he founded and now chairs. To run multimedia programming down twisted-pair wires, the regional Bell operating companies now propose to use discrete multitone technology (DMT), the basic technology conceived by Baran for Telebit and now the leading digital subscriber loop (DSL) method, taken up and perfected by Amati Communications, just down the road in San Jose. StrataCom, recently purchased by Cisco for $4 billion, began as a leveraged buyout spinoff from Baran’s Packet Technologies.

Metricom, a Baran company with investments from Bill Gates, among others, offers wireless Internet services through Baran’s neighborhood and at campuses across the country. Baran’s company, Equatorial Communications, introduced spread spectrum commercially as a way of delivering information from satellites below the noise floor required by the FCC. Spread spectrum is now, in the form of the CDMA of Qualcomm and Globalstar, the world’s fastest- growing communications technology. And it is the basis for the flourishing, unlicensed wireless systems, such as Metricom, operating at less than one watt of transmit power in the ISM (industrial, scientific, medical) bands.
Collectively, the visionary concepts of this once- myopic and still-modest engineer offer the foundation of an effort to reinvent the Internet in an increasingly wireless form and reshape the communications policies of the nation and the world.

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