 for 600 megabytes (a compact disk) of data. Is the market going to tolerate paying incrementally for data? Will subscribers be willing to have a tollbooth on the information highway, which, up until now, has been free of usage charges? This is going to depend on how well wireless data service is mar- keted, how much value it actually adds to its subscribers, and the ability of wireless service providers to offer high-quality and high-capacity wireless data service. Acceptance for volume-based usage charges for data and more expensive data rates also depends on the alternatives. Cellular data services are competing not only with each other but also with a number of other rapidly growing alternatives. There is some evidence that the road warriors who are seen as key data customers actually may pre- fer high-speed DSL-based landline services at hotels, even if it means that they are not connected all day long. And the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (LAN) stan- 2Never mind that some Internet service providers (ISPs) are selling a big pipe to a tiny spigot by overselling their server capacity. Customer expectation in landline data is a modest monthly charge for all the bits you can use. While these figures came from marketing hype, technology prices tend to come down fairly fast once a market is established. We will wave our hands and assume that the baloney factor of mar- keting hype will be balanced by cost reduction and technology development. Let us therefore as- sume that this is attainable cost. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Special Situations Special Situations dard, popularly called wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), is being deployed rapidly, including, in some cases, for public access that will compete with cellular data services in so-called hot spots, where there is high demand for data services. 38.3 Conclusion This