“The rate of growth in wireless and for telecommunications in general means people are looking for new and more ways to connect, so this will be a good investment, even 10 years down the line.”
Allan Houston, a guard for the New York Knicks, told me that April 20 at the grand opening of his first 3PT Wireless store on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I thought of what he said as I and 40,000 other cyclists passed within a few blocks of his store May 2 while pedaling north from Battery Park at Manhattan’s southern tip toward Central Park.
This was the first leg of the 23rd annual Five Boro Bike Tour, a 45-mile jaunt over city streets closed to automotive traffic. Nextel Communications Inc. and RCN, a landline telecommunications newcomer, were among five lead sponsors of the event.
There were five official rest stops along the way, and the pace was leisurely due to the large crowd size. Helmets were mandatory, but people took the pauses in the action as opportunities to remove their head gear and keep in touch with others via their wireless phones.
“The social reality is that telecommunications allow people to be witnesses to their own lives in an autocatalytic world, where they can’t anticipate changes but want to tell someone about them as they happen.”
James A. Taylor, chief marketing officer for Iomega Corp., Roy, Utah, said at last year’s Personal Communications Industry Association PCS ’98 show.
Overhearing snippets of conversation in passing often is an amusing exercise. Examples of Taylor’s thesis in motion occurred often during the bike tour as people used their wireless handsets to locate friends and family from whom they had gotten separated along the route.
“I’m in line at the Port-O-San,” a man behind me said into his cellular phone.
“Meet us at the bar,” another man spoke into his handset while waiting for the Staten Island ferry to bring weary cyclists back to Manhattan at the end of the ride.
There also were people who wanted to stay connected to friends or family members who weren’t along for the ride, recounting their experiences as they happened instead of after the fact.
“What am I doing now? I’m standing here with a million other people,” a man said at a rest stop.
Wireless phone in one hand, water in the other, he may have wanted to bring the immediacy of his experience to his wife and young children at home.
The Five Boro Bike Tour showed the sunniest side of wireless, a world of instant and untethered communications keeping people connected. That’s as good as it gets. It’s as nice as having all the major roadways in New York City closed to cars so you can pedal freely and enjoy the scenery on a sunny spring day.
