On any given day, you can pick up a newspaper and read about killings and suffering abroad due to political unrest; ethnic, religious and racial rivalries; border and territorial disputes; declarations of independence; and expressions of nationalism. Indeed, it seems there is no end to reasons folks have for slaughtering each other. Intolerance is fertile worldwide.
While relative peace and prosperity reigns in the United States and in other industrialized nations, much of the world remains embroiled in a state of utter lawlessness where might makes right.
Yet in the midst of this unruly, sometimes deadly chaos, commerce-including the wireless kind-lives, and thrives. It’s as absurd and surreal as the hellish war-world of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, a world in which Milo the salesman flourished.
Wireless technology, it turns out, also seems to flourish around the globe no matter how messy the political and economic circumstances.
To appreciate this, grab a copy of Global Wireless-the sister publication of RCR Wireless News. In it, GW Editor Sandi Wendelken and her staff will bring you up to date on wireless goings on in Ireland, Indonesia, Iran, Philippines, Algeria, Nambia, South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria, Senegal, Slovenia, Bangladesh, Laos, Tanzania, Mauritania, Russia, China and other countries where, when they’re not fighting one another, people are talking with each other.
For Heller, Milo represented one half of the military-industrial complex that fed off World War II and that feeds off all wars. To be sure, it’s easy to be cynical about commercialism in the midst of otherwise sordid conditions in societies different from ours.
But when it comes to the integration of wireless, the Internet and other communications technologies into countries struggling with political and economic reforms, there is room for optimism and hope.
Not only is wireless deployment conducive to commerce generally, but within the technology lies the seeds of a potentially powerful democratizing agent. Democratic and free market reforms require openness, something that wireless technology inherently promotes with vigor.
While spectrum auctions, 3G technology wars and global mega-mergers dominate the news, the real revolution is happening in distant lands. It’s for real.
