More good news for engineers in the RF industry: Cahner's In-Stat Group has predicted that the wireless data market will grow from about 170 million subscribers worldwide in 2000 to more than 1.3 billion in 2004.

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Do you believe it? I do. We're talking worldwide here. I once thought the United States was ahead in everything, but that comes from my patriotism instilled in childhood. Now that I've traveled overseas, I have found that other countries have been somewhat ahead in the mobile communications arena. (Could one of the reasons be .... The FCC?)

It was three years ago in Cannes, at the GSM World Congress, where I first saw the SIM card and how phone users could have access to news and weather in their phones. I didn't see that in the United States at that time. Granted, part of the reason Europe skipped ahead was because wireline rates were expensive there. Many people have primary access to Internet and e-mail through their mobile phones, so Europe had to advance as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the United States has more than 60 million households with wired Internet access, according to Cahner's.

It doesn't take long for us to catch up in wireless, but it was someone from Finland who showed me his mobile phone with QWERTY keyboard and Internet access earlier this year. Of course it didn't work in Boston, but it just proves that wireless data is a worldwide market.

Cahner's also estimated that more than 1.5 billion handsets, PDAs and Internet appliances are expected to be equipped with wireless capabilities by the end of 2004. And some of us thought the world wouldn't make it past Dec. 31, 2000.

Look out. U.S. companies are going to be providing many of the components and engineering for these devices. If you haven't already (we know you have, we know you're going crazy, doing the job of three people), get stocked up and ready to go. Business is booming.