o- ple use their laptops more when they have wireless access and are therefore more productive. It is easy to see why many industries will turn to wireless to boost pro- ductivity, and during the next 5 to 10 years, wireless MANs, LANs, and PANs will be instrumental to bringing wireless broadband not just to offices and homes but to users, wherever they may be. Although in the past there were clear demarcations between what comprised a MAN, LAN, or PAN domain, today those boundaries are often blurred, particularly as the technologies complement one another. Therefore, the merging and working together of MANs, LANs, and PANs to create a seamless, always-on, and always- available network environment is a natural outcome. MANs, LANs, and PANs are each distinguishable today by definitions and parameters set in the standards, but Chapter 15 WMANs, WLANs, and WPANs Table 15.1 U.S. and European Wireless Standards Comparison Network Type United States Europe IEEE 802.20x (Mobile-Fi) EDGE (GSM), 3GPP (UMTS) IEEE 802.16x (WiMax) ETSI HiperMAN, HiperAccess IEEE 802.11x (Wi-Fi) ETSI HiperLAN IEEE 802.15x (Bluetooth) ETSI HiperLAN as technologies advance, expand, and merge, we can expect that the application and implementation will define the domain rather than traditional physical param- eters, such as range of coverage. In addition, domains will continue to evolve SO that in the near future, we'll be discussing body area networks (BANs), fabric area networks (FANs), and, dare I say, even implant area networks. (Implant area net- works do not exist as of yet, but given the rapid and vast progress in implants, from medical to financial to security to identity applications, it is only natural that we envision a network, perhaps relying on our own human physiology, that serves the communications needs of the multitude of life-enhancing implants lodged in the twenty-first-century definition of an intelligent being.) As shown in Table 15.1, the IEEE (www.ieee.org) and ETSI (www.etsi.org) have both established hierarchies of wirel