Nokia's clash with RIM centred on wireless local area network (Wlan) connections to the internet.

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My car, outfitted with a GPS position finder and an off-the-shelf wireless local area network (WLAN) communication system, was tipped off by another car carrying the same gear.

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The company, which provides phones that work off a wireless local area network (WLAN)--a Wi-Fi network designed for the workplace--had recently acquired KIRK Telecom, a privately held Danish provider of wireless communications products.

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Cheetham, who sings bass with a choir in Holmfirth in West Yorkshire, told CNN that he first had the idea several years ago, while working on a contract investigating speech over wireless Local Area Networks (LAN).

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Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) devices today operate in 555 megahertz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band, and are used for short range, high speed wireless connections including Wi-Fi enabled local area networks and fixed outdoor broadband transceivers used by wireless Internet service providers to connect smart phones, tablets and laptops to the broadband network.

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Because we have the screens, processing power, and battery life to make tablets much more capable than was possible only a few short years ago, and because today these tablets will support wireless broadband as well as local and wide-area connectivity.

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In the end, I believe that wide-area wireless networks will take over the hotspot marketplace and stitch together combination offerings that include both wide-area and local-area high-speed data access.

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