In city after city, high-speed wireless access may be the next Internet revolution. But don’t go out warchalking; this is not your mother’s WiFi:

“I’ve got a Dell laptop on my knees and the wind is in my (very short) hair. I’ve got as many windows open as a beach house in summer—Google searches and instant messages to my wife; in the background, a new batch of e-mails downloads and my hometown public radio station streams on. It’s the usual cruise down the information superhighway at 2 Mb/s.

But I’m also hurtling down an actual superhighway—U.S. Interstate 4, at a very real 115 km/h. I’m in a Ford Mustang convertible, under cotton-ball clouds and a postcard-blue Florida sky. The Dell is outfitted with a prototype card that communicates with a test network set up by broadband wireless start-up MeshNetworks Inc.

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Mesh is the only company to have figured out how to dynamically hand devices off from one access point to another at broadband data rates and six-lane freeway velocities. But beyond that, Mesh, along with Ricochet and other wireless point-to-point networks, are the best hope for a fully mobile future—a world where we can teleconference each other, watch news and entertainment in real time, order from online catalogs, pay our bills, and answer e-mail—anywhere, anytime, on ever smaller and sleeker handheld devices powered by ever more powerful microprocessors and software.” IEEE Spectrum