The big news in wireless last month was the realization of the long-rumored "Project Rainbow" as Cometa Networks. Cometa is a joint venture of AT&T, IBM and Intel (and a lot of VC cash) to establish what will be the largest and most influential public-access wireless-LAN company to date-and possibly for a long time to come.

While no financial numbers have been released, I expect this august group to spend upward of $50 million on Cometa-and if that's not market legitimacy, I don't know what is. Public wireless LANs have always been a question of when, not if, and the when is clearly this year.

Given that no realistic business models exist for public WLANs, it would be essentially impossible for any single company to establish the footprint needed for both economies of scale and reasonable return on investment, especially in today's economy.

This means that-as is the case with cellular-there will be lots of players in this space, from local guys to (as we now have) leaders of the Fortune 500. Cometa will function as a "carrier's carrier," essentially a wholesaler of WLAN capacity. I think that this is a great business model, since I also believe that the cellular carriers are likely to dominate retail public WLANs.

Cometa will make it easy for the carriers to leverage the investments they've already made in marketing and customer support (such as it may be), and simply add a new service to their arsenal. And I think cell phones with 802.11b built in will begin to arrive by the end of 2003, as will handoffs between WLANs and 2.5G and 3G cellular, allowing the public WLAN industry to grow at an even more significant rate.

What many analysts have missed in their musings about Cometa is a much more important impact that the company will make-specifically, in establishing the standards that will lead to unification of the public-access WAN industry.

The situation today is much the same as existed in cellular before intercarrier agreements provided seamless roaming and unified billing. Cometa's real effect will be not so much in broadening geographic coverage, but in providing the basis for simplifying the customer experience-and that is indeed worth quite a bit.

So, 2003 is starting off with a bang. Let's hope this momentum carries over to the rest of the industry as well.

Craig Mathias is an analyst at the Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.).