I want wireless broadband, and I want it now!

Do you have, or want to have, broadband to your home? According to Yankee Group research, about 4% of U.S. homes have broadband in the form of DSL or cable modems. At least 16% will have it by 2004, and about 40% want it. That's about 40 million homes that are lusting for broadband.

The problem is that wanting and getting are two different things. If you wait for your cable or telephone company to offer broadband, you may wait forever - and even then, expect some trouble. When I ordered an ISDNline from my telco, the installer had to ask me for help.

Fortunately, an alternative is emerging - wireless broadband. You call your ISP and it delivers a little box that plugs into your computer. Twenty minutes later, you are screaming along at 1M bit/sec - and paying no more than $40 per month. This is not a dream or a futuristic scenario; it's going to happen within six months.

"Wait a minute, Howard, is this really possible?" you ask. Yep, both possible and soon to be available through your ISP. It will be coming to you over the unlicensed part of the spectrum, the part reserved for microwave ovens and other consumer electronics products.

This is getting interesting. We hadn't thought we could get broadband over wireless before, but it looks like we can - and we can use the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz spectrum to build a micro-cell broadband wireless network where there is no line-of-sight requirement or external antenna requirements. For about $1 million, you can provide a wireless broadband infrastructure capable of handling 3,500 subscribers, which is nothing.

A few years ago, Nick Negroponte, who teaches with me at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested we got it all wrong: America was using wireless communications to send broadband (TV signals) and wired communications to send narrowband (telephone signals). He suggested we switch, and use wireless for narrowband (cellular) and wired for broadband (fiber to the home). I am suggesting that solution is obsolete: We can send both narrowband and broadband to the home - wirelessly.

Look, almost half of the U.S. population today is ticked off. They can't get broadband through DSL or cable modems, and they are getting the runaround by incumbent local exchange carriers and cable companies. The IEEE 802.11 people have known for some time that, worldwide, certain parts of the spectrum could handle broadband.

Demand is growing 48% per year for just dial-up and almost twice that for broadband. My fellow academics at MIT are talking about a new world of object technology that can handle all the streaming media you want - wirelessly. Recently I was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "You'll give up your first born before you'll give back your cable modem!" When my kid, Spike, called to ask if this was really true, I told him, "Not just any modem, but a high-speed modem."

But now I want mobility. I want to move around my house with my laptop, I want a megabit of bandwidth and I want it now! Will that satisfy me? No. I want 10 megabits, wirelessly, in five years. I want to roam, and I am willing to pay 50 bucks a month to be able to do so - and so are the 40 million other households that I hang with.

So let me be clear: I want 1 megabit, I want wireless, I want roaming, I want one-hour installation. I want it now. I want to pay up to $50 per month. I want to pay less than $300 for the customer premises equipment portion. I want it to my computer, laptop, PDA and, eventually, my car.

I don't really care who gives it to me: my ISP, cable provider, computer manufacturer, milkman or bookie. As Peter Finch said in the movie "Network," "I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore."

Anderson is senior managing director of Yankeetek, a venture incubator in Cambridge, Mass. He is also chairman of The Yankee Group and the William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He can be reached at handerson@yankeetek.com.