Unfortunately, I live in USA, a Broadband Third World country. I am using Comcast which is not bad for the price ($50/month). My website cost another $60/month so I am thinking about pulling in a T1 into my house at some point so I can kick the box physically.

ArrayCom would be nice.

A bit of the "always on" feeling is already true for me: have a wireless network at home, a Orinoco product. That connect to a DSL cable modem. I can sit on the veranda in the shade (in the sun I do not see anything on my laptop) and trade on eBay. Or if guests occupy my work room (home working place), then I go working down in the living room. That is really nice and funny to be flexible :) BTW: I pay around 12 Euro for DSL and 7 Euro for a 2GB volume per month.

UMTS system is to becoming a truly global, where your USIM will be connected to your PC and you can access the network through GSM/WCDMA/WLAN systems. Your PC will effectively become another part of the network. 3G system will also add another dimension to he Internet; you moving location.

People do not realise that UMTS licenses were not really that expensive. Only in two contries that was the case. In most of the countries licenses were cheap or almost free. The problem at the moment is the airtime charges for data, but the situation is no different than in 1992 with GSM. Everyone was saying GSM does not work well, no good handsets, it is too expensive, licenses were too expensive, calls were more expensive that analog ones etc.

All the "higher data rate" competing technologies are not open standards and I would like to see them performing in a dense high-load urban mobile environments. If you read the WLAN stories in CeBit2003 you know what I mean. WCDMA and cdma2000 can drive the data rates close to Shannon's limit and are quite robust in high interference. If you sacrifies your interference resistance, it is easy to increase the peak speed.

UMTSWorld is my personal web site, I wrote that and still believe in it.

Hi Petri, thanks for the comment. With the link to your site I wanted to provide a counter part link, don't want to bother you, sorry. My original post was inspired by a 3sat tv broadcast: "Marty Cooper. Visions of the planetary computer" (see http://www.3sat.de/neues/sendungen/spezial/48621/index.html ). As I have seen they are driving in a car (think San Jose) with a laptop wireless connected through i-BURST technology with two live internet video streams running and talking with a people through a i-Phone (IP telephone) in realtime. And this was really impressing! The focus of your website is defined by it's name, but it is always a good idea to also watch other interesting upcoming comparable technologies.