the Terms of Use as given at the website. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY 17 To facilitate the gigantic investment needed to uproot older infrastructure and the massive deploy- ment of new technologies for carriers, which is what the transition from second-generation technol- ogy to third generation implies, some intermediate solutions have been proposed by infrastructure equipment vendors and explored by carriers. Two popular and quite promising examples of this wave of technology include General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE). Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) is commercially less successful. These 2.5-generation technologies provide enhanced transmission speeds, and they can be deployed for the most part on the current second-generation wireless infrastructures. This enables carriers to proceed with the delivery of third-generation-like services without having to foot the bill for the huge imme- diate investment that is required for the establishment of a full-fledged third-generation network. However, the sudden and explosive growth of wireless LANs (WLAN) and access technologies like IEEE 802.11, 802.16 etc. create an environment where the prospects of 3G cellular telephony may be endangered. At the same time, the development of Mobile IP is leading to the possibility of having a unique IP address that will allow users' devices to be accessible no matter where they are. Clearly, we are moving toward a realm where the traditional phone number and the IP address of a computer are merged into the same sequence of digits. This trend is further supported by the fact that the traditional wireless handset has started embedding functionality that until recently was only available inside a personal digital assistant (PDA), an entertainment box such as an MP3 music player, or a portable video player most likely to be working along the MPEG4 lines. Today's wireless telephones ma