evenues in the years ahead by enabling new and powerful communications services that consumers are demanding. Africa and the Middle East are seeing huge investments in wireless infrastructure, with many areas of developing countries receiving cell-phone service before they even have running water! Cell phones are a global phenomenon, crossing all demographics and societal strata and providing amazing new opportunities for the people of the world to connect and communicate. Not surprisingly, mobile technologies are evolving at a breakneck pace-though still not fast enough for most consumers! With widespread adoption of this technology less than a decade old, many consider it to be relatively immature and facing a great Video Communications: The Whole Picture deal of growth in the years ahead. In many ways, the mobile communications industry is going through the same growth process that the PC industry went through in the 1990's, where the most "bleeding-edge" technology that can be commercially purchased is completely eclipsed only a few months later by something better, faster, and oftentimes less expensive. As a result, the most tech-savvy consumers are changing handsets at least twice annually, and sometimes every 3-4 months. Devices are being replaced not because they no longer function properly, but rather they lack the capabilities enabled by newly improved networks. This cycle is beginning to slow as newer handsets become more modular, mobile handset software becomes more mature and enabling technologies become more standardized. It is difficult to conceive that only a few decades in the past all of these technologies were either drawing-board concepts or theoretical ideas of futuristic "Science Fiction" writers and dreamers. Synoptic History Of Mobile Communications Even thought the "industry" of consumer cellular phones can be dated to the early 1990's, the roots of the technology go much deeper into our history. Arguably the first cell phone user was the 1930's comic book hero Dick Tracy whose "wrist rad