This chapter is a brief overview of the basic principles and standards driving the world of wireless applications.

Unmatched opportunities in the mobile and wireless areas are attracting the attention of business and development. Wireless markets, including personal area networks (WPAN), local area networks (WLAN), and wideband local-area networks (WWLAN), have an estimated value today of several billion dollars according to the Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/5 about/pressreleases/pr11mar2003a.jsp)

According to Gartner, increasing focus on teleworking and corporate mobility to improve enterprise performance, and trends such as the move toward the real-time enterprise, will not merely exploit mobility but will demand it. At the same time, the relentless push by vendors, virtually giving away wireless capabilities with significant price/performance improvements, is fueling demand for wireless technology in the corporate marketplace. United States federal regulators are expanding the radio spectrum for wireless internet users to help bring broadband connections to rural areas.

The number of wireless devices on the Internet is growing fast. The stock of IP addresses is now almost exhausted, so it is about time to extend the Internet with Internet 2, which replaces the current IPv4 protocol with the latest IPv6 protocol and drastically increases Internet capacity and improves Internet security.

A great competition for multiple markets, running different wireless technologies, has just begun. The winners will be those wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) and wireless application service providers (WASPs) that can offer connection and content services and optimize development solutions with a unified approach across multiple client devices.