John Chapman brims with enthusiasm. The director of Hewlett-Packard's mobile and wireless strategy has just signed a three-year research agreement with NTT DoCoMo, the cellular spinoff of Japanese telecom giant NTT. The goal? To brainstorm the infrastructure for a wireless network with such abundant capacity that, according to Chapman, "we will no longer bother to measure it." Hewlett-Packard has allied itself with NTT DoCoMo-whose name means "anywhere"-because the Japanese firm is the world's leading mobile-Internet provider. An estimated 72 percent of Japanese cell-phone owners routinely connect to the Internet, compared with a mere six percent in the United States. Chapman believes that if Hewlett-Packard can offer Americans rich streaming video, data, graphics and voice over a high-speed network that reaches every street corner, subway platform, beachfront and backyard, they will sign up in droves.

How to build this broadband wireless network is the burning question. Telecom companies would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to catapult today's narrowband cell-phone infrastructure to broadband. This is no mere "upgrade." Today's meager cell phones and wireless Web devices connect to the Internet at a laggard 9,600 bits per second, less than one-fifth the speed of the average desktop modem. And even a desktop modem doesn't qualify as broadband. Its speed has to be at least qua-drupled for users to enjoy instant Internet access and to view full-motion video with movielike quality.