Marty Cooper literally comes down from the mountaintop for our interview, arriving ten minutes late and a little out of breath after skiing all day at Vail. He apologizes and pulls off a sweater before sitting down. "It was tougher territory than I expected," he says exuberantly.

Mountaintops suit Cooper well-the septuagenarian might well be dubbed the Moses of cellular telephone service. In 1973, while at Motorola, he led the development of the first portable cellular phone. In doing so he delivered the market from AT&T, which had first conceived of cell telephony and had lobbied the Federal Communications Commission for retaining a monopoly in using the technology.

Cooper is no stranger to tough territory, either. His company, ArrayComm, is championing a radically different vision for the future of broadband wireless networks, a vision that flies in the face of the incremental progress being eked out by telephone companies worldwide.

Rather than building on existing cellular networks, Cooper argues, wireless data networks of tomorrow need to have new technology to support them. ArrayComm's "smart antenna" technology de-ploys proprietary software and antenna arrays that are able to target recipients of transmissions precisely. It can then allocate bandwidth to carry those transmissions between two points, rather than broadcasting signals in every direction, as conventional networks do.