The Financial Times has summarised the 2001 demerger as "in hindsight... one of the worst strategic errors in UK corporate history, given the rapid growth in mobile communications, as it left the former state-owned UK telecoms group without a cellphone business".
Iridium's globe-girdling constellation was supposed to be the next big thing in mobile communications when it went live in late 1998 (Science, 2 October 1998, p. 34).
This type of seamless interoperability is the future of mobile communications, and it's a welcome one.
Naturally, with the frequency at which we send mobile communications today, whether it be over email or SMS, it's becoming increasingly important to express ourselves in a way that don't lead others to think that we've been hit over the head one too many times.
Unlike the U.S., which has a number of competing wireless standards such as CDMA (code-division multiple access), TDMA (time-division multiple access) and PCS (personal communication service), Europe has a single standard, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), which makes it easier to deploy phones on a multinational basis.
Starting with my first job, at Mobispine, a mobile communications company in Sweden, it's been important for me to have a personal connection to the work.
As mobile communications started to boom, it soon became the jewel in Racal's crown — so much so that Cable & Wireless, another British telecommunications group, tried to buy Racal in 1988.
For an air war that has dropped nearly 11,000 precision bombs and missiles on troops, Hussein family palaces and air defenses, the focus will shift to picking off specific targets, like mobile communications vans, to make it harder for Iraqi forces to give and take orders.
Vodafone recently created an Internet Services division to develop mobile Web services and lured Pieter Knook, a senior vice president in Microsoft's mobile communications unit, to run it.
