As cellular phone rates have lowered and access has become pervasive, the reasons for making a cell phone call have expanded from event-driven planning conversations to a kind of verbal, geo-locator service.

You see this geo-locator service use as soon as your plane lands, and the cell phones come out. Or, as school lets out for the day. Or, just for the heck of it, every half hour.

Or, if you live in a city with mass transit like I do, it isn't uncommon to see high-school and college students call their friends every third stop, advising them of their whereabouts.

Today, the geo-locator functionality of cell phones took on an amplified, if tragic meaning. As you probably know by now, there were a string of fatal subway and bus bombings in London. Given that they occurred in the morning rush hour, it would not be unfair to assume that hundreds of thousands of London commuters were in transit when the violence struck.

On a terrible day such as today, six things are likely to happen:

*As news accounts of the bombings reach loved ones and friends of those in transit, their first reaction will be to try and call the cell numbers of the people they care about;

*Those who manage to escape injury will call their friends and loved ones to assure them they are OK;

*Those near the scene will use their cell to call emergency responder agencies with updates and pleas for additional help for the wounded;

*Some emergency responders will use the cell network for communications;

*Emergency responder agencies and hospitals will be flooded with mobile calls from anxious, on-the-go friends and relatives who cannot reach the people they care about;

*Cellular networks will be flooded with text messages to and from commuters, and sometimes to each other.

Add up all these stark reasons, and you'll have a day such as today, one which U.K.-based cellular carriers won't ever forget.

In fact, London's telco networks swamped,an article just posted on the technology section of the (Toronto) Globe and Mail's Web site attests to this fact.

According to the G&M's Catherine McLean and Scott Deveau:

Wireless carrier Orange reported double the amount of daily traffic;

Wireless provider O2 experienced call volumes more than twoce that of normal weekday levels, and compensated by putting twice the traffic on the same bandwidth;

BT Mobile reported some uncompleted calls due to network congestion, and;

Vodafone UK experienced network congestion and posted a message on its website asking all of its central London customers to "avoid making unnecessary or lengthy phone calls."

Let's hope we see many more days where more cell calls are made for trivial reasons- and a day like today never happens again.

Today, we read that more than 26.4 million people around the world sent text messages in support of the LIVE 8 campaign to cancel the debts of poor African countries.

OK, that's nice. Now let's just say that the G-8 industrialized nations, leaders of whom are meeting this week, decide on this gesture.

What happens?

Nothing.

The very nations that owe the most money are, for the most part, plagued by endemic corruption and disease. Economies freed up by debt relief to appear more attractive to job-creating investment will find factories owned by those who are already in, or who have access to power. Workers will be paid less than sustinence wages. The very top people will still live in mansions and have Swiss bank accounts. And AIDS will continue to ravage the cities and countryside.

Now, if those same text-messagers, well, text-messaged or emailed the heads of the giant drug companies who refuse to mark down the cost of AIDS drugs for poor nations, and text-messaged the heads of evil tobacco companies that flood impoverished countries with their cancer sticks, then we might get somewhere.

According to at least one online Japanese-English dictionary, that roughly means "stop thief!!"

To catch a thief and more, Japan-based security firm Sohgo Security Services is introducing a robot called the Guardrobo D1.

Here's how this 109-cm tall ( that's three feet, seven-inches for metrically challenged folks like me) will work. Set up in banks, shopping malls and offices, Guardrobo will be equipped with camera and sensors that will detect unauthorized activity, such as intrusions or holdups. Or even fires or water leaks.

Then, if Guardromo detects the bad stuff, it will send radio alerts to "human" guards as well as route live camera footage.

Guardromo will be available in about a year. Pricing has not yet been disclosed.

Oh, before I go, Japan Today has an online forum thread devoted to this topic.

My favorite reply, presumably about the territory that Guardomo will patrol:

"That'll put them in the toilets more than the average security guard," Forum member holeypost writes.

OK, one more:

"Will these things have guns like Terminator? I need some robots to clean my house"- gunmagaijin.

About 25 years ago, I watched a 1956-vintage episode of "Science Fiction Theater."

In the eppy, an overweight, late 50s, soon-to-retire police officer was chasing a suspect down an alley.

The suspect climbed a fence. As the patrolman attempted continued pursuit by climbing the fence, he fell to the ground with quite a serious coronary.

He survived, and was implanted with a device that would monitor his heart movements and let a nearby hospital know if anything funky was detected.

The technology worked. The next time his heart was stressed, the radio signal was dispatched to the hospital and help came in time.

Now, I'm reading about an Ottawa, Ontario-based company called Zarlink Semiconductor. They've just rolled out a chip that could let doctor's monitor a heart patient's pacemaker in real time, from miles away.

According to Reuters wire service, the chip is inserted inside a pacemaker, which wirelessly sends data (such as an abnormal heart flutter) to a bedside base station in the home. The base station then sends the information over the Internet or phone to a doctor's office.

Once the doctor, nurse or hospital attendant gets notification of the problem, they could then use the two-way wireless link to adjust the pacemaker.

We're not quite up to the capabilities depicted in that Science Fiction Theater episode, but we are getting there.

As Reuters' reporter Susan Taylor writes:

"Potentially, the tiny chip could let a pacemaker tell a similarly equipped mobile phone to contact emergency services during a heart attack. A phone with global positioning system technology could even help locate that patient."

Including out-of-shape policemen chasing robbery suspects.

Can't agree more with my Corante colleague Dana Blankenhorn. "Always-On" is arriving, and medical monitoring is the killer app.

No, make it the prevent-killer app.

A story that moved on Reuters last week reports that the National Football League is in talks with Sprint to offer game highlights on mobile phones.

The partnership with Sprint would broaden a relationship that already offers audio highlights of NFL games to Sprint phones. Additionally, Kansas City-area based Sprint has been a Kansas City Chiefs sponsor for a decade.

I suppose if you are traveling, and missed your favorite team's Sunday's game highlights, you might want to see exactly how that 40-yard touchdown pass went down.

To me, though, a service like this has some built-in production value challenges. The NFL playing field is long and wide. Sometimes, the plays that make the best highlights are best depicted from a wide camera angle.

Until 3G phones come- I forsee pixely highlights with narrow angles. I love football, but not enough to settle for inferior video.

Get me to the hotel, and to ESPN. For now.

Research firm IDC is out with a new study entitled "Bert and Ernie Go Wireless: The Emergence of the Cell Phone as a Wireless Babysitter."

The study explores the role that Verizon Wireless' VCAST video service has in enabling growing numbers of children to watch shows such as "Sesame Street" on their cell phones.

Quoted on information technology website TMC.net, IDC Wireless and Mobile Communications program director (fancy term for major analyst) Scott Ellison says that in his observations, young children he has offered his Sesame Street-containing cell phone to in airports liked the technology a lot. So much so, Ellison reports "a near 100 percent success rate at tears and tantrum avoidance.

Yes, this new wireless generation is hooked- from the zygote stage.

I am a Pacific Northwest resident who loves the outdoors. And, as you might guess, one who also loves technology.

Wearing both hats, I read with interest a piece in Saturday's Chicago Tribune entitled Good news for campers: more parks wired.

That finding came out of a just-published Intel unwired cities poll.

"One finding this year is that more and more campsites and parks are equipped with Wi-Fi so that people can keep connected even as they commune with nature," Tribune reporter reporter Jon Van writes.

"It is kind of surprising, but people like to have acess to their email and the ability to download photos when they go camping, " Intel consumer education manager Ralph Bond ("Bond. Ralph Bond" is quoted as saying.

I wanted to see how true this is. I went to the website of JWire, which offers a browsable and searchable list of more than 67,000 Wi-Fi hotspots all over the United States, and the world.

There's more than 27,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in the U.S. alone.

One of the more interesting campgound hotspot listings I found was for the Devil's Tower KOA in Devil's Tower, Wyoming. Honest.

Is Wi-Fi access important to you campers out there? Let us know!

I'm driving home today from a latte at that coffee superchain - the one that offers T-Mobile Hotspot access in most of its locations.

Then, a 1962-vintage instrumental came on the radio. The song was named after one of the transcendant telecommunications infrastucture leaps we have made as a species.

I am talking about the satellite Telstar, and the song that honored the device.

Upon Telstar the satellite's launch on July 10, 1962, the free Internet-base encyclopedia Wikipedia notes, "Telstar (became) the first active communications satellite, the first satellite designed to transmit telephone and high-speed data communications, as well as the first privately owned satellite."

Despite all of Telstar's deserved acclaim, I thought that well, it must have done its job for a few years, and then either was decommissioned or fell to earth as newer birds got launched.

No. There have been nearly 20 Telstars, including at least a dozen in current use for a variety of telecommunications and satellite television applications.

Now here's an irony. As livery, Telstars promise to outlast its original developer, AT&T- set to be merged into SBC Communications in months.

Oh, and the whirring "sound" of Telstar, as rendered in the recording of the same name by the Tornados?

I always thought it was a spiffy sound effect, but "Telstar" the record was released a year before the Moog Synthesizer was invented. Composer Joe Meek generated the sound by -get this- running a pen around the rim of an ashtray, and then playing the tape of it in reverse

Several weeks ago, I posted an article here called Music Goes Mobile.

In part, the article explored mobile device, mobile programming and mobile music executives if they could visualize a time in the near future when music-enabled mobile phones will be a competing music platform with portable music players.

While all three sources I spoke with agreed that the sound quality of mobile phones is dramatically improving, none would daresay that mobile phones would supplant portable music players.

Two analysts quoted in a newly posted Wired News article tend to agree. They envision that for the forseeable future, music players will predominantly be for music, and cell phones for talking- with some music capability as an extra for those users who really want it.

Michael Gartenberg, research director for Jupiter Research (gee, Mike, that title is kind of repetitive, don't you think), tells Wired News' Katie Dean that he and his colleagues "don't see (music over cell) as a displacement any more than digital cameraswere displaced by camera phones."

A key issue for Gartenberg is price. "As long as music phones command a significant premium over regular phones then it's going to be difficult to see how the consumer will embrace them."

Even those mobile users who want to enjoy music won't throw away their iPods. "We think there's going to be a very large middle area where people will use both types of devices," IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian (who I am sure by now is much more than tired of that "are you related to.." question) told Dean.

I see the saliency in both viewpoints, but speaking purely as a focus group of one here, gimme an iPod (or similar device) that also makes and takes phone calls.

A new article on the website of the Hollywood Reporter indicates that Comcast- the largest broadband Internet service provider in North America- is seeking a toe-hold in the wireless world.

Maybe not just a toe hold. Maybe more than that.

Comcast's goal, contributing editor Diane Mermigas described Comcast senior executives as saying, would be "to offer itscable TV subscribers the ability to check their Comcast email, voice mail,on-demand video selections and conduct personalized product and service searches on a branded Comcast phone."

Mermigas- who I worked with directly for years and for whom I have the highest professional and professional respect- says that in terms of infrastructure, a major Comcast wireless effort could play out in one of several ways.

These might include Comcast re-selling Sprint or T-Mobile wireless service. I could see this working this way: you buy a Comcast-branded cell phone, as well as minutes from Comcast- but actually you are buying Comcast minutes out of a giant pool of minutes they've purchased from say, Sprint PCS. Not so far-fetched: Qwest Wireless is a Sprint PCS reseller. And DirecTV also has a similar re-seller relationship with Verizon.

The other major scenario Mermigas proposes is that a wireless phone provider and Comcast would strike up a deal allowing for "personalized services across multiple media platforms."

Either scenario sounds plausible -even not to the exclusion of the other.

The July issue of Mobile magazine has a list of the Top 100 Forgotten Gadgets.

These are gizmos that either failed to catch on for any combination of several reasons: because they didn't have enough marketing or distribution money behind them, because they got outraced by better solutions - or because they like didn't work.

Here's a summary listing culled from the Top 40 listed Gadgets with functionality (or lack thereof) relevant to what we talk about here. If any evoke special memories, be sure to post a comment:

7- Cobra Dynascan Cordless Phone;

8- Texas Instruments TI-81 Graphing Calculator;

10- Timex Sinclair ZX-81 (a primitive portable computer);

19- palmOne Treo 600 (yea, I was wondering about that one as well, but I guess the 600 made the list because it was soon superseded by the popular 650);

35- HP 200Lx PDA. 1996 vintage, and ugly.

If you're wondering what was #1, I'll only provide limited information. According to Mobile magazine, the cited device was developed in the late 1800s to "treat female hysteria."

Got it, right?

Wanna know more, read the article.

Would you pay $29.95 for Wi-Fi Internet access for the entire length of your flight? What about $9.95 an hour?

USA Today reports that United Airlines is already working with Verizon Airfone to test the service. Apparently, it has been demonstrated to the Federal Aviation Administration's approval that yes, this type of technology won't jumble pilot-to-ground communications.

Technically, the service could work. Marketing-wise, I think it is a smash. The USA Today piece says that 38% of frequent business travelers who responded to a Forrester Research survey said that they would use the service even if it were priced at $25 a flight.

The next time you fly, note the number of business travelers working with their stored email files and PowerPoint presentations. I think this is a ready made market. Count me in.

This morning, I read an Associated Press piece about a service called Grafedia.

Here's how it works. Advertisers put up a teaser message on, say, a sidewalk or telephone pole. The message is either an e-mail address or the address of a Web page, both mappable to grafedia.net.

With your cell phone in your hand you walk by the advert, and then send a text message to the address listed on the message.

Then, depending on the ad, a bigger ad display will open. Or, perhaps, you'll see a history of the building or neighborhood open up within the display you've just SMS'd.

I was bopping around this morning thinking "kewel," at least up until I told this story to someone who approaches technology from a far more practical mindset than I sometimes do.

"Let me get this straight," the X-chromosomal unit says to me. "I've seen enough ads today already. So when I see this ad on the sidewalk, I am supposed to stop walking, get out my cell phone, and send a text message to the sidewalk so that I can see another ad?

Case closed.

Several weeks ago, a woman here in my home town of Portland, Oregon drove off a bridge while yacking on her cell phone. It was a hands-free handset, by the way.

Fortunately, she survived with mere cuts and scratches on her face. She was more than lucky. Instead of the admonition "Hang Up And Drive," "Hang Up Or Dive" would have been a more relevant caution.

Then, last week, someone nearly sideswiped me while executing a left turn through an intersection on a busy, two-lane street. She was talking on her cell phone as well.

I'm the last person to knock communications technology. I've had a cell since the 1980s, and while I might be happy to see you, that is a cell phone in my pocket.

Still, maybe I'm old fashioned enough to adhere to the notion that when driving, you use your cell in an emergency. Such as calling in a police report of a knife fight on the street that you are driving on, or helping a fellow motorist in distress. Or, if necessary, return the day care center's call.

While driving, you do not use your cell phone to ask what you should pick up at the supermarket, what DVDs you should pick up. Nor do you call your Realtor, your broker, your hairdresser. Pull to the side of the road for that.

Which naturally leads to a discussion about whether local governments should ban cell phone use while driving.

I'm not a reflexive Libertarian, but I would say no. For every near-miss, there's got to be many multiples of successfully executed talking-while-driving conversations. So to me, the issue is whether government should regulate behavior that is more risky than normal - or whether your own common sense should prevail.

Here's how I would parse this issue. Don't outlaw cell phone driving. Instead, sell cell-phone-while-driving permits to individual motorists, and then use the proceeds to support E911 services. Those permit-holders who would abuse the privilege and either cause accidents or get arrested for other moving violations would lose their permits.

And of course, see their insurance rates rise as well.

(This is an update of an original post about Pocket Tracker, a tracking solution that uses GPS technology to find missing people in rural areas. Thanks to Pocket Tracker co-founder Tony Barrett for taking the time to get back to us with some necessary clarifications, as well as some interesting additional information).

There we were this weekend, pitching an RV in the rugged Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon.

These are mountains where outlaws used to flee, and never got found. Sometimes, that still happens. Except, in my part of the world, those outlaws are more likely to be meth dealers rather than cattle rustlers.

Other times, the good people get lost. And that's where Pocket Tracker comes in.

Union County - a mountains-and-sagebrush expanse of some 2,039 square miles - has a search and rescue group that looks for about 50 missing persons a year. It's now testing the Pocket Tracker, a carry-along unit that consists of a GPS and radio transmitter, connected to a HAM radio frequency.

Search teams use the device to map and coordinate their locations, marking areas already searched and which ought to be combed next. Pocket Tracker is set to work on either 144.390 MHz or 144.340 MHz.

Pocket Tracker was co-invented by retired HP engineer Jim Hall, as well as Tony Barrett, a former HP engineer who owns the HiValue Radio company in Boise, Idaho (about 150 miles as the vulture flies from Union County).

Pocket Tracker also contains additional equipment besides the GPS and the radio- a TinyTrak3 GPS encoder. The tracking system used by Union County SAR also works with two county-owned digi-peaters that were donated by an area resident. Union County got a $4,528 grant last year for 10 complete PocketTracker setups.

Now, they are being tested. This is no lab test - unless your "lab" is wide open spaces, don't fence me in, Marlboro Country.

Literally. Barrett told me that unless a horse turns a certain way, a signal can even work from within a saddlebag. "A PocketTracker was tested on a horse during an endurance ride last summer. It was mounted directly behind the rider near the horse's spine and worked well," Barrett says.

Barrett adds that when he skis with the Pocket Tracker and its antenna completely inside his coat pocket it works just fine. He notes that his own favorable experiences are corroborated by numerous positive feedback on the Web.

The next series of tests will take place next month, in the desolate Starkey region of Union County. In addition to assessing device functionality, the role of that test, as well as others, will in part be to specify the best locations for signal repeaters.

Last night I was thinking about how our ability to work and communicate on the go has compressed the time it takes for us to perform various tasks. To put it another way, we can get more done in a shorter period of time.

I know I'm getting into "well,duh" territory here, but hear me out. When it comes to task-related time management, we will - if not are, already - get to a point of diminishing returns.

What do I mean? Well, in technology, one way of quantifying "diminishing returns" is by positing that particular point when specific functions and applications reach a confluence with immutable laws of physics and as a result can advance no more.

Think of portable devices. They are getting smaller, but our thumbs are not. And, eventually, chip size and capacity will hit the wall, too. And there's a case to be made that nothing can be made to travel faster than the speed of light.

When it comes to using mobile devices for time management efficiencies, there's an immutable law in our path.

On this planet, we only get 168 hours a week. It was 168 hours before humans walked the earth, 168 hours when we lived in caves, 168 hours when we first built fire, the wheel, the semiconductor. And, until we establish colonies on asteroids and outer planets, this paradigm is not going to change.

Eventually, the ability of our mobile devices to help us do more is going to hit the wall. Why? Simple. The Earth, our Earth, is stuck at 168 hours. To put it another way, our planet is not scalable.

Anti-virus digital crusader McAfee has formed a partnership with mobile phone feature management solutions provider Bitfone to enable security protection for mobile phones over the air.

Bitfone's solutions are found in phones made and sold by such venerable names as Motorola, LGE, SK Telecom, Sony Ericsson, QUALCOMM and UTStarcom.

Here's how this thing will work. Bitfone will add an embedded McAfee scanning engine to its device management solution. With this added functionality in place, you'll have a mobile client-server set-up that will let cell phone operators prevent, detect and if necessary, recover from viruses, spyware, worms and auto-dialers that attack their networks.

Both on the mobile sys-admin and individual phone-diagnostic level, the McAfee component will be loaded for action. It will enable the Bitfone platform to perform remote diagnostics, scheduled updates to virus definition files, and even purge and reset an individual subscriber's handset that may have eluded the safety net.

As cellular networks get faster, viruses will propogate. Or, attempt to. That's why this solution will take off.

The other night, I watched Charlie Rose, an intellectual rarity of a television personality, interview palmOne CEO Ed Colligan.

U.S.-based Rose and Colligan talked about the feature set of palmOne's new LifeDrive, as well as the somewhat older but still spiffy Treo 650.

Although Colligan was obviously on the "Charlie Rose Show" to score points with the daily production's well-educated viewership, he did make a point that the mainstream media, technical press and even bloggers don't make often enough.

His point: handsets are becoming robust and feature-rich to the point that they are not only augmenting laptops. They are replacing laptops.

Think about it. Today's full-bore PDAs have functional (if smaller) QWERTY keyboards, can do email, have the ability to run spreadsheet applications, and, of course, are phones as well. In just a few years, they've come a long way from simple hand-held organizers that you had to synch up to your PC. Heck, now devices such as the Treo, the Nokia 9110 and the BlackBerry are PCs.

What we're waiting on now is for 3G networks to arrive in force. Colligan told Rose this may take place next year. I say that given the massive investment, it will be more like two. But when this happens - in simultaneous time with steadily improving processors - we as a mobile society will get to the point where more and more of us will realize that we have all the computer power we need right on our handset.

And if that happens, we'll go for the $350 handset before the $1700 notebook.

This week marked a historic if artistically indistinguished moment in the world of mobile music.

For the first time ever, a ring tone topped the British singles best-seller chart.

The piece was "Crazy Frog Axel F," a series of melodious rings and beeps based on a decade-old high-pitched sound edit of a Swedish mo-ped revving up with the hook, line and stinker from the theme to 19xx's "Beverly Hills Cop."

I've been trying to assimilate all this. Of course I can recite back all the analysis and perspective I gathered from the interviews I did for Music Goes Mobile, the fourth part of my Future of Wireless series. Everyone's mobile, cell phones have better sound quality, ringtones rule.

On a personal level though, I just don't understand. Maybe it is because I come from the school that the only useful purpose for a ring tone is when you are in a crowd - to distinguish the sound of your mobile's ring from that of others. And the older I get, the less often I am anywhere near crowds. In fact this afternoon, we're going to forgo a huge festival down at our hometown's riverfront to spend a weekend in a county that has more cows than people.

If I want to hear music, I have a separate device for that. iPod works fine, and so does the music in my head.

But then again, maybe I'm just too dang old.

This week, the Portland, Oregon City Council will discuss a five percent tax on cell services.

To which I say: it is about time. We need the money. Bring it on.

The issue here, as well as in the community where you live, is that many land-line users have forsaken their traditional public-switched telephone to a cell-only number.

Currently, those users are not taxed. As the proportion of land-line phone accounts declines in most North American cities, it stands to reason that the city- already strapped for funds - is even that much more hurt.

Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard has the best solution. Lower the land-line tax from the current 7 percent to 5, and match that with a cell phone tax.

Cool, I say. Too many of us use our cell lines too often, anyway. I mean, hang out at any mall, store, in front of the local high school, on public transit, even the street corner, and you see the teenagers gabbing away about what they are doing at that precise moment.

Tax 'em on over-minute fees, too. Collect $3-$5 a month from several thousand jabbering high schoolers, and heck, junior high schoolers, and maybe you'll raise enough money to hire another teacher for the school they go to.

The other day I was thinking how far hotels have come in providing Internet access for travelers.

Wasn't all that long ago that you would find hotels that were so freaked out their guests would steal the phone itself that they bolted the instrument to the wall. Unfortunately, that precluded easy compatibility with the laptop computers of the time. Anyone remember acoustic couplers?

Then, in the late 1990s, it was rare to find a hotel that didn't at least let you run a cord from the back of your laptop to the back of the phone. Whether or not your laptop's dialing software was compatible with the hotel's PBX was a matter of doubt.

That lasted a couple of years. Soon, by the turn of the millennium, hotels started to offer second lines for data. In most cases, that meant you could talk and be online at the same time. The only bummer: in most cases, speed was limited to dial-up.

Just two or three years ago, hotels that offered guests in-room high-speed Internet access were still somewhat of a novelty. Those properties that did provided such services offered it by means of an Ethernet cable that a guest could plug in to their own laptop computer, or a keyboard guests could use to control a basic-featured broadband Internet browser on the in-room television.

While in-room high speed wired Internet access is still growing, a relatively new feature has been coming to guest facilities in the last year or so: wireless high-speed broadband. I am talking about Wi-FI throughout the property, not just in the lobby, business center, or in-house restaurant but down to the farthest reaches of each hallway.

Most often, these services are offered for free. Although hotels have to pay wireless Internet companies for these services, they eat the cost to guests. After all, the type of guest who would use this amenity is likely to be tech savvy, a decision-maker. These are folks who, if pleased, would book you again - and recommend that their colleagues and peers do the same.

The growth of high-speed broadband has coincided with the rapid expansion of Wi-FI (Wireless Fidelity), a technology that allows laptop computers and other mobile devices equipped with an appropriate card to access the Internet directly over the air.

The widespread availability of these services in high-volume traffic locations such as airports, coffee shops and bookstores has convinced computer makers to offer laptops with the built-in ability to access the Internet via wireless broadband. So, with plenty of conditioning and marketing about the convenience of this technology, business travelers have been asking hotels if they provide the service.

Hoteliers report installation is inexpensive and with the use of wireless Access Points to relay wireless signals, the technology relatively easy to enable throughout the property. Plus, if a guest requests Wi-Fi, they are already likely to use the technology - making detailed training of front-desk personnel in Wi-Fi unnecessary.

Hundreds of properties are offering the service. In the next year or two, expect thousands.

Not long ago, a song from my early childhood entered my brain. The tune was, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," by the late comedian Allan Sherman.

In the song, a homesick lad in his first moments at sleepaway camp is writing a letter home to his parents, complaining, in essence, that he is both bored and freaked (believe me, that combination is very plausible, and I say that as an adult).

Then, driving around on Friday night, the old song "See You In September" came on the radio. The lyrics had to do with a guy temporarily saying goodbye to the lady he had a crush on, biting his lip as he sang out loud how worried he might be that he would "lose (her) to a summer love."

What does this have to do with the Unwired world? Let me explain.

The world of the kid at the sleepaway camp, as well as the city gal at the summer lakeside resort, doesn't exist anymore. Communication meant writing a letter just before going to bed, and then dropping it off the next morning for pickup. Then,two or three days later, the letter would be delivered to your parents, or your loved one, or your now-ex loved one - in the hot steamy city.

Now, with cell phone and e-mail ubiquity, kids at summer camp can call their city-bound friends hanging out at the mall, and rub it in. Or, that 16 year-old camp counselor can call her high-school sweetheart every night on her Verizon calling plan.

I'm all in favor of staying in touch, but something's lost here. The ability to retreat into another world, to be essentially unreachable in summer, is lost.

No more "see you in September." Now, it is "I'll call you on your cell tonight."

I've been reacting with some skepticism to the recent FCC ruling that (apparently) all Internet phone service providers provide E911 services within four months.

The mainstream media has been portraying this decision as one in which the FCC has finally gotten it right, and that, besieged by public outcry, the four major U.S.-based regional phone companies who would need to provide all their 400 or so Voice over Internet Protocol rivals access to E911 have finally bowed to the public's wishes.

Would be that this were true.

Instead, the phone companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into this. They are announcing all these deals with the likes of Vonage because investor's hate uncertainty, lawsuits and regulation.

The problem is that while SBC's, Qwest's, Verizon's, and BellSouth's apparent deals with Vonage to provide them with E911 sound so cooperative, what is really going on with here is the industry equivalent of "most-favored nation" treatment. I don't see such a rush to accede to the E911 technical needs of those independent VoIP providers who are less capitalized than Vonage. And,given Vonage's latest $200 million funding round, that means about everyone.

Vonage is playing with the big boys now, no longer leading the charge for its fellow pure-play VoIP providers. That's why I say Vonage is now part of the establishment.

You hate commercial radio, right?

Of course you loathe the same focus-tested, 300 songs over and over. If that many. "More Than A Feeling" by Boston - what, for the 5,567th time?

And what if you are in, or manage, a local band? Good luck getting played on commercial radio. That station you'd love to play your music has a focus-tested playlist configured down to the last song. And the disk jockeys that sound like they are in your community could be hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

By now, you may be well aware of the Internet's ability to let your music get heard. You may not have heard of Mercora, a user-contributed digital radio network with more than 20,000 fully searchable channels available daily. Sound quality is great, and access costs either $4.99 per month, or $3.99 a month for an annual sub.

Just today, Mercora became available for Windows Mobile-based handhelds. Mercora IM Radio Mobile v1.0 is more like a portable radio with 20,000 channels than a mobile iPod. That's because most of its source material is streaming music tracks in real time, rather than downloads transferred from a Mac or PC to an iPod.

I'm not saying Mercora is better than iPod. It's just different, and may open you up to music possibilities you've never even knew existed. You can also IM fellow Mercora members about the tracks you are listening to, or to suggest that they tune in to a specific channel.

I hope this doesn't sound like an ad, but if you were to see an ad for Mercora, you would see that the new Mercora IM Radio Mobile v1.0 costs nothing extra if you are already a Mercora subscriber.

Just in the last week three of the four major old-style regional phone companies in the U.S., have been making frantic announcements that they have been talking to Internet-phone service leader Vonage about ways to ensure that Vonage's subscriber base (600,000 and gaining weekly) can call E-911.

Count Qwest, BellSouth and SBC among the ranks of those who are promising to play nice. Verizon made a similar declaration a few weeks back.

But, as so often happens in the world of corporate speak, those announcements aren't what they seem.

What is really going on is that all of a sudden, after protesting loudly that they are under no obligation to grant Vonage rights to their E-911 infrastructures, the big telcos are playing nice for two reasons. Which are:

*They don't want to be forced into providing E-911 access.

*They don't want to get sued anymore than they have for not offering this access.

Jes' so happens that the FCC is taking up mandatory E-911 on May 17. That's a week from today. And new Chair Kevin Martin has made noises about the fact that he'd really like his staff to come up with technical guidelines for making mandatory E-911 feasible.

Do I need to tell you how like almost any enterprise, big telcos hate to be regulated? See, if they provide E-911 access to competitors such as Vonage, that would render obsolete a key marketing approach on the big telco's part. That would be because the flavor of "911" that you get in most VoIP services does not route the emergency call directly to the dispatcher.

And, if Vonage - a company that wants to eat the old Bells' lunch - gets their way, you can bet thy pippy most of the other 500 or so VoIP providers in the U.S. will insist on the same rights.

Now as to the lawsuit part, State Attorneys General in Texas and Connecticut have each sued Vonage for making misleading statements about E911 in their subscriber contracts. I have read this contract, and as I have commented elsewhere, I think the problem is not intentionally misleading wording, but the fact that these contracts are clumsily crafted and poorly arranged from a topical organization standpoint.

Such transgressions are more sins against the language than the law. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think sins against our language are actionable.

Wait, there's more. It appears almost inevitable in that hockey-deprived land north of the 49th parallel, cumpulsory emergency services access will be mandated by Canada's telecommunications regulatory agency. Looks like a 120-day countdown.

That, I must tell you, scares our telcos half to death. They are acting nice because they don't want to be told what to do.

But even if Vonage does get welcomed into the E-911 infrastructure bosom of the big telcos, that really doesn't solve all the problem. You see, if you call 911 over a VoIP connection that does not map back to your physical address of record, there will not be an easy way for the emergency responder agency to know where you are. Third-party solutions exist, but it's unclear whether roaming VoIP E-911 will be mandated.

The bottom line, then, is the telcos are saying they will make nice with VoIP leader Vonage to stall for time.

Stall for time until these E911 access solutions become so transparent, so easy and inexpensive to implement, that it will be no sweat off big telco's back to do so.