Broadband Advisor

In their quest to get Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, people have done some pretty desperate things over the years.

What will happen to my earlier version of Firefox?

A long-term battle is brewing between two emerging high-speed wireless technologies, WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Each would more than quadruple existing wireless wide-area access speeds for users.

Think Starbucks should offer free Wi-Fi in its shops? Want a more comfortable chair to sit in while sipping your latte? Now you can tell the coffee giant exactly what you think, and if enough people agree with you, Starbucks might just do it.

If there's one thing the digital revolution has taught us, it's that we shouldn't get too attached to anything. Technology has a way of seizing long-held ideas and entrenched industries and turning them upside-down.

Not convinced that superfast 802.11n Wi-Fi is for you? Allow us to persuade you.

US consumers using an expanding array of broadband services, including movie downloads, video games, online backup, and streaming audio and video, are flooding the nation's broadband pipes with data--and it could cost them.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told an interviewer at Macworld this week that Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader will fail. His shocking reason?: "People don't read anymore."

Some day the IEEE will get around to finalizing the 802.11n standard that it began working on in 2003. That some day was supposed to be 2006. Then 2007. Then 2008. Maybe, the standard will be finalized in 2009. Maybe 2010.

After a rocky start, the latest flavor of wi-fi, 802.11n, should come into its own this year, with prices for new equipment coming down significantly and lots of options for sale to add 802.11n technology without getting rid of your older gear. And networks will start to move from the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum to the 5 GHz spectrum, where there's less danger of interference.

When it comes to the "next big thing," I'm usually pretty skeptical. (It's from all those years I've spent trying to get gear to work as advertised.) But in 2008, we will see some long-promised technologies--like the connected home, truly smart "smart phones" and environmentally friendly tech--start to bloom. And even if they don't live up to all the hype, they'll make life a lot more interesting.