Wireless Web: A Managers Guide (Addison-Wesley Information Technology) Book

Business leaders, investors, analysts and others who need to get a handle on the state of the art in terrestrial wireless data technology will be well served by Frank Coyle's Wireless Web: A Manager's Guide. The title is accurate--this is no manual for turbo-nerds or standards committee members--and Coyle serves his target market well. He's perhaps a little bit guilty of not reporting the shortcomings of technologies and their implementations, but he more than makes up for his slight boosterism (at one point he mentions, apparently straightfacedly, washing machines that communicate with chips in clothes to determine if the clothes are light or dark) with lucid, reasoned prose. With that prose, he explains how technologies differ, how they stack up in the marketplace, and how they might be put to use to provide services that customers will pay for. Coyle has embraced full management-book style, with lots of skimmable margin notes, bulleted lists, conceptual diagrams and flow charts. That said, he's included plenty of technical information, particularly the kind that has to do with transmission speeds, range, reliability and subscriber capacity. He's also done a great job of providing his readers with enough knowledge of key terms to make sense of industry news articles and of explaining how related technologies--such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML)--fit together to form working applications. The history lessons he provides, which are stories of the factors that led to the acceptance or rejection of wireless technologies in various markets, are invaluable to businesspeople eager to learn from the experiences of others. --David Wall Topics covered: Technologies, products, and services related to the delivery of digital data to users without the use of transmission wires, with emphasis on end-user devices like pagers, mobile phones, and wireless local-area network (LAN) equipment. Bluetooth, the IEEE wireless LAN standards, third-generation (3G) mobile phone technologies (including GSM, TDMA, and CDMA), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and its related specifications, and Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Java as used in wireless applications are all covered, as are (to a limited extent) the security questions wireless poses.Read More