Mobilising the Net

Bringing the Internet and mobile communications together, as service providers and manufacturers are now doing, will create a new mass medium for communication, interaction and transaction along with a high-volume industry supplying the associated infrastructure. A combination of technologies is creating a direct evolutionary path from today's low-bandwidth mobile connections and limited text messaging to full scale Internet access via mobile networks. Bandwidths of up to 2 Mbit/s, available through UMTS, will allow the most demanding of today's Internet applications to be carried out using portable devices. Some of the applications of this combined technology, the portable devices and the media processors are described in this paper.