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Americans peer enviously across the Atlantic at European wireless

One of the more poignant revelations of just how much catching up American's brand-new GSM phone network has to do, still, can be gleaned from a Reuters story carried on the Forbes magazine web site. It speaks, wonderingly, of SMS messages and how commonplace they are in other parts of the world.

The story doesn't even touch on some of the facilities available to European and Eurasian phone users - for example, the online dating services offered by companies like Valis , which (in Switzerland, for example) allow kids not only to get in touch with each other, but to find where each other might be, within 500 yards in most cities.

But although the impression given is that America lags badly in mobile phone services by comparison with the GSM-rich regions, and even more compared with Korea and Japan, the story fails to emphasise just how far ahead America is with the sort of user-generated infrastructure that WiFi "hotspot" wireless is bringing to US cities.

Market leader is probably MobileStar, which is providing broadband Internet access in Starbucks coffee houses in New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Austin, and Seattle already - with more to come. It's not "mobile" data the way SMS messages are, perhaps - but it is megabits of data per second, not a dozen kilobits or less.

Outside the UK, Europe is making great progress with wireless hotspot Internet access, with mobile phone companies like Telia, based in Scandinavia, installing hundreds of access points. But there is still little or no freelance activity, with individual businesses setting up hotspots in their reception areas, and selling the airtime to subscribers. That seems to be an American and Australian innovation.

Articles like the Forbes feature give a false comfort to European telcos. They are head, of course, in GSM technology, and Americans are rightly envious of what they still can't have in the US. But it's hard to overstate the potential importance of a growing network of access points funded and financed by individual Internet users in high-traffic areas, which is now reaching the stage where it could pose a real threat to the GSM network of today, and the 3G network of the future.