1. Introduction

Though it's not normally a stop on my annual trade-show tour, I made my way to the CTIA Wireless 2004 show in the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta Georgia this week. Contrary to what you might think from its name, this show isn't devoted to 802.11 wireless data products, but instead to wireless in the larger sense of the word.

Billing itself as "The largest wireless event in the World / The largest telecommunications event in the country / and The most significant technology event in America", this show's primary focus has been mobile communications of the voice kind. The show's focus, however, is well into a transmogrification into voice / data and I came to see how the reality of this change matched up with the hype.