Wireless in San Diego

When Ken Berger accepted a transfer from Palm Springs, California, to the San Diego offices of Thermo Electron Corp., he promptly landed in house-hunting hell. Over the course of six months, working with two different realtors, Berger lost four separate bidding wars on homes in the area. Meanwhile, the 41-year-old business-unit president and his family were camped out in a temporary apartment. Then he found a new agent, Rick Rothman. In just one week, Berger had his new house--2,600 square feet, three bedrooms, and a den in an upscale, gated community just a quarter mile from the ocean.

This time around, there was no bidding war. Rothman had spotted the newly listed house on his laptop, thanks to its high-speed wireless connection, and used his wireless printer to take care of the paperwork. "It was a last-minute decision to swing by and see the place when we saw the listing," he says. "Ken decided he liked it and was preapproved for a mortgage, so I printed the contract on the spot and had him sign it right there--and the transaction was done. It was amazing!"

Welcome to the new wireless world. It's not just about checking your email mid-Frappuccino at Starbucks, or even about surfing the Web via Wi-Fi in the lobby of your hotel. Here in San Diego, wireless technology is already changing daily life and work in all sorts of ways for all sorts of people, from real-estate agents to doctors and pharmacists, office-building managers to hotel housekeepers.

In part, that's because the telecom and wireless industries have been woven into the life of this city for decades. One key event was the founding of an early wireless outfit called Linkabit by two pioneering University of California at San Diego professors in 1968. A generation later, spin-offs of Linkabit, such as Qualcomm, litter the local landscape, alongside the wireless divisions of larger companies such as Nokia and Siemens. As a result, San Diego has the highest concentration of wireless employment in the country. Add 75,000 miles of underground fiber- optic cable--more than in any other region of the country--and you have a picture of a very connected city. "People here see this stuff at work every day," says Berger. "It gives them higher expectations than most for seeing it put to use in their everyday lives." So take a close look at wireless San Diego, because what is now on the cutting edge here will soon set the standard for the rest of the country.

So how did Rothman actually get that house for Berger? The story starts with a Verizon service based on a nifty new technology produced by Qualcomm called EV-DO, or evolution data-optimized. Using a simple PC card, users can immediately connect to the Internet at speeds up to 2.4 MBPS (about as fast as a cable modem) from anywhere in the Verizon network where the service is offered. This kind of system is known as a wireless WAN, or wide-area network, because it includes vast swaths of geographic area in its coverage zone. By contrast, Wi-Fi, which more people are familiar with, is a wireless LAN, or local-area network, technology. Its data connections are lightning-fast but concentrated in a very small coverage area--usually a radius of just 100 to 300 feet from a base station--so it's not much use to, say, a real-estate agent showing houses scattered across the greater San Diego region. Wireless WAN data connections have been available on the nation's various cell networks for several years now, but mostly at speeds even slower than dial-up. The new Qualcomm/Verizon EV-DO network is the country's first metropolitan wireless WAN service that approaches broadband speeds.

Using a wireless Gateway laptop hooked up to the Verizon network, Rothman checked the online real estate MLS, or multiple listing service, which showed him that a new house had just gone on the market. Immediately, Rothman drove Berger to see it. Rothman filled in the contracts on his computer and sent the documents to his HP wireless printer. Seconds later, the contracts were signed by Berger and the seller of his new home.

Rothman, who, with his wife, co-owns a real-estate agency called HomeBuyer Agents, says that the technology has transformed business for him and the 15 agents who work for him, nearly all of whom are EV-DO-equipped. "We work in very competitive markets. This kind of real-time access makes the difference between you getting a house or getting into a bidding war the next day that ultimately costs you the property," he says. Verizon rolled EV-DO out in San Diego and Washington, DC, last October and, if it likes what it sees, should take it nationwide in the near future.