From Investor's Business Daily, by James Detar: "All aboard! Wireless broadband is about to roll out of the station.

"Digital subscriber line and cable modem services provide about 40% of U.S. households with broadband Internet access...Now, regulators are about to OK a standard that would give people mobile broadband wireless.

"A mobile version of WiMax will be unveiled within days, insider Fawzi Behmann said in a recent interview.

"Indeed, mobile WiMax might have far more potential than its fixed version. For one thing, there’s hope for faster speeds...Where users must be within 300 feet of Wi-Fi nodes to use that service, they need be merely three to five miles from WiMax towers.

"Mobile WiMax will first be in notebook PCs, in 2007, Intel says, and will go into cellphones a year or so later...

"About half of the 200 million PCs sold a year are notebooks. Cell phone makers expect to sell about 780 million handsets this year. If mobile WiMax pans out, these products are candidates for WiMax chips. And so are game players, MP3 music players and a bunch of other portable gadgets. For whichever technology wins out, wireless broadband chips could be one huge market...

"WiMax is a strong wireless contender, says ABI Research analyst Alan Varghese. 'Is WiMax all hype? I don’t think so,' he said. He points out that it can carry a big load of data, including music, movies and business data."

Read the full story online at Investors.com

There's huge, and growing, demand among consumers for Internet radio (at least during the 9AM-5PM workday), as shown by the rapid growth of our AccuRadio project.

 From BusinessWeek.com, by Steve Rosenbush: "The number of Wi-Fi users

"Encouraged by Wi-Fi's success, tech companies are poised to launch...WiMax, which will allow even faster Internet access across larger areas...

"(T)he time frame required for a new technology to reach widespread acceptance is getting shorter. It took a decade for cell phones and CD players to really take off, but new technology such as Wi-Fi, digital cameras, and Apple's iPods have achieved mass adoption in much less time.

"There are still plenty of skeptics who say that WiMax will run into a different set of obstacles. Available licensed spectrum — the valuable swaths of the radio band where access is controlled by the government to minimize interference — is in the hands of a few big providers. Telecom companies such as Verizon and Sprint Nextel already have begun to roll out 3G wireless networks that will have a head start in the wireless Internet market.

"At first, people hoped that WiMax would operate on unlicensed radio spectrum, just the way Wi-Fi does. While Wi-Fi is prone to interference from microwave ovens and other small devices, WiMax signals that travel over miles are subject to countless sources of interference...

"The number of WiMax connections is expected to hit 8 million in 2009, compared with less than 100,000 forecast for 2005, according to Johnson. The key to driving sales is the establishment of global standards. The worldwide WiMax Forum, which includes players such as Intel and Dell, has agreed upon standards for fixed and portable WiMax devices, like computers and laptops."

Read the full version of this story at BusinessWeek.com.