No Strings

Moriarty, 2001 states in Educause Quarterly that "It appears that the major change on campuses will come through applications involving mobile wireless." Moriarity considers that the use of the new wireless technologies in colleges and universities will follow typical businesss cases; one case might be that without wireless access, the students will not come. She believes that it is a case of the culture pushing the change and that wireless technology will make or break the economic viability of many institutions of higher learning. Moriarty, 2001

The 2001 National Survey of Information Technology in US Higher Education
http://www.campuscomputing.net/summaries/2001/
The 2001 survey data reveal that wireless networks are an increasingly important issue for all sectors of higher education. One-fourth (24.3 percent) of the campuses report that they have a strategic plan for wireless networks; another third (32.1 percent) report the strategic plan for going wireless is currently in development.

Roughly half (50.6 percent) of the institutions in the survey report that they have functioning wireless LANs, compared to 29.6 percent in 2000. Another tenth (10.8 percent) report that wireless LANS will become functional this year. Just 6.2 percent of the survey respondents indicate that full campus wireless networks are up and running at their institutions as of Autumn 2001, compared to 3.8 percent in 2000; an equal number (6.6 percent) report that their campuses will be fully wireless during the coming academic year (vs. 3.8 percent in 2000). Across all sectors, the 2001 data suggest that wireless services cover about a tenth (10.9 percent) of the physical campus at those institutions reporting wireless networks. Campuscomputing

An informal survey Steen, 2001 of computing leaders at a number of campuses with fully developed wireless infrastructures shows that wireless on campus leads to some obvious results. Students, faculty and staff move to own more laptops and take them from place to place on campus more than the ever did with wired connections. Dining rooms, libraries, lawns, athletics facilities, offices, hallways and classrooms become places for email, surfing the net, looking at course web pages and instant messaging. For students with wireless laptop computers, there is no longer a need to go to computer labs - no need to use library terminals. The wireless step is the critical one that frees students from the confines of fixed locations. Faculty too, take their computers between offices, labs, libraries, classrooms and meetings and the resources of the net are available to them.

In meetings, also, wireless computers change the way the participants behave. During a presentation or discussion wireless participants can go to websites and check what the speaker is saying. It is a new experience for a presenter to stand before a group, in which everyone is reading or typing on their computer. The participants also use messaging to comment on the topic at hand, to take polls and to plan for future presentations.

According to IDC 2002, the number of mobile workers in the U.S. will increase by 12.7 million between 2001 and 2006, from 92 million to 105 million. In contrast, the number of workers who are not mobile will actually decline by 2 million through 2006, down to 53.8 million. This means that by the end of 2006 roughly two-thirds (66.0%) of U.S. workers will be mobile workers. ”We are just beginning the fourth stage of mobile working,” said Raymond Boggs, program vice president for IDC’s Small Business/Home Office services. “With portable PCs and cell phones in the 1980s and 1990s, mobile workers could stay in touch with customers and colleagues. Now with wireless networking and VPNs – virtual private networks – they have access to a full range of corporate resources.”

Key IDC Market Findings: Mobile professionals will grow from 18.2 million in 2001 to 24.1 million in 2006, driving the most technology investment of any mobile segment. Mobile non-travelers, the workers who rarely leave town but who are often in meetings or away from their desks, will be growing in number by 10% annually to over 13 million in 2006. Occasionally mobile workers, who travel less than 20% of the time, are actually declining in number. But rather than retiring their carry-on luggage, a growing number of these workers are graduating to the next level and joining the more committed mobile professionals.

The Taylor Nelson Sofres, 2002 report of a 30-nation study indicates that meeting and creating the information needs of young and upscale consumers can be instrumental to the growth of wireless Internet. The report based upon a 30-nation study of established and emerging mobile markets posits that the growth of the burgeoning mobile Internet can be fueled by marketers who meet the current information needs of target consumers and create demand for new types of information via this medium. The research firm predicts that marketers who concentrate on the youth and affluent population segments will have the greatest chance of capturing the wireless Internet market. The report, “Wireless and Internet Technology Adoption by Consumers Around the World,” reveals that consumers under age 25, and upscale consumers will drive the demand, much as these two groups drove the overall mobile phone market. The report states that the interest of the youth segment is particularly strong in Western Europe and the United States.

ZDNet, 2002 quotes Forrester Research estimations that 45 percent of the North American online population use instant messaging once a week and 90 percent of that group use it daily.
Instant Messaging Planet, IMPlanet, 2002, states that a survey released in Autumn 2001 by Jupiter Media Metrix found that in terms of at-home use, the number of people using the Yahoo instant-messaging (IM) client climbed 25% to almost 12 million users. In the at-work category, Yahoo Messenger usage jumped 83% to 3.4 million users.

According to NewsFactor Network, 2002 the attractions of instant messaging (IM) are obvious: The software knows when others are online, enabling employees to avoid engaging in time-consuming "phone tag." Analysts call IM "real-time e-mail." IM began as a teen tool for chat and became popular worldwide almost instantly. Currently, there are a number of free IM products available from well-known companies, such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. NewsFactor refer to research firm Gartner which has estimated that there are now more than 100 million IM users worldwide, and that by 2005, IM will be used more often than e-mail. Gartner also has estimated that corporations using IM could reduce internal
e-mail volume by 30 to 40 percent, and voice mail volume by 10 to 15 percent.

SMS continues to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise depressed mobile telecoms industry. Its usage continues to increase, especially among young adults. But even more promising is the increased use of SMS for new applications like opinion poll voting and competition entry. Forrester (2), 2002

The Indian edition of Network Magazine state that as various wireless technologies continue to evolve around the world, it will be the usefulness of content and applications, interoperable standards, and user acceptance that decide their fate. The need for geographical freedom prompted the convergence between wireless and computing leading to the emergence of wireless technologies. Logically, the wireless applications that will succeed are those that address issues of urgency, personalisation and relevance. Network Magazine, 2001

Sample of typical responses from students in Trinity College:

What do you presently use in terms of learning aids and communication tools?
(Ranked in terms of importance)

• internet - extremely important,
  books - secondary
• www, library
• my PC is my learning aid - coupled with the internet it is indispensable
• The laptop distributed by Trinity - this laptop is very important

• mobile phone, email
• mobile phone, email, ordinary phone, instant messaging
• email, SMS, internet, paper notes, handouts
• mobile phone, landline, email

• inevitable, invaluable, under-utilised
• efficient, distractive
• the only way to really learn
• once you use one it is difficult to go back to learning without it
• wireless laptops very beneficial and much more practical for web resource access
• computers may never replace teachers - however, they are a bonus to have at our fingertips for research
• useful way to learn by yourself, great tools for group collaborative work
• computers, used as a gateway to the internet are a superb tool for learning; time-saving, efficient, fun (graphical)
• can distract in lectures, but gives lots of freedom with your work
• computers absolutely necessary for learning, but they introduce a distraction factor - at least at the beginning

Bank Systems and Technology Online reported in May 2002 that a consortium of eight Wall Street firms is about to transform the way buyers and sellers of fixed-income securities do business using what, until recently, has been a grassroots technology: instant messaging. Traders who now use email and rows of phones to manage a crush of information will have a new tool that promises even greater speed and efficiency. The firms will extend an ambitious multicompany instant-messaging network begun in 2001 to two thousand institutional investor clients. The goals: greater customer convenience, faster communication, and improved efficiency via an archived system that can be audited in case a record of communications is needed. The deployment is based on Communicator Inc.'s Hub IM instant-messaging service, which securely connects businesses without requiring them to use a common email client or server. The service ties into the Wall Street consortium's portal, Bond.Hub, which is also hosted by Communicator and links participating dealers' Web sites.

Warchalking (marking out wireless access points) is the latest street activity according to Wired News 2002. The Wired News article Wi-Fi Users: Chalk This Way credits a London architect, Matt Jones, with the naming of the concept. Wireless wanderers, Jones suggested, should mark the locations of available 802.1x type wireless network access points with the recognisable double-curve symbol on nearby walls. That way, others following in their footsteps would find them even with laptops closed. Jones' idea was to "to put something in the right place to add some visibility to this invisible nervous system that's growing around us." Jones envisioned the marks as a modern version of the hobo sign language used by low-tech kings of the road to alert one another to shelter, food and potential trouble.

Salon.com Salon 2000 report Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if it actually worked, they hoped to be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than the speed offered by cellphone operators or other wireless providers. "To be honest, we just thought it was pretty cool," says Westervelt, a 28-year-old systems administrator at RealNetworks who spearheaded the effort .

According to Wired News 2001 Stefan Heinze, deacon at the Hannover Evangelical Youth (Germany) delivers religious services via mobile phone text messages. More than 1,300 young people in Germany signed up by May 2001 for the mobile-phone service. The whole service is reduced to six text messages. That's one for a welcome, another for a quotation, another for the sermon, two for the Lord's Prayer, and then closing words. Heinze queries why a sermon has to last 20 minutes when the same thing can be relayed in a few short sentences?