Via the good old Beeb, a look at wireless standards we can expect in our phones and laptops any day now:
The wireless world is evolving into three types of networks – a Personal Area Network (Pan), which covers your immediate surroundings, a Local Area Network (Lan) for the home or hotspot and a Wide Area Network (Wan), which can cover a large geographic area.
One of the newest technologies on show at CES in the field of personal networks is Transfer Jet from Sony, a system to transfer bursts of data between devices in ultra close proximity. The system can transfer data at speeds of up to 480 Megabits per second (Mbps), which makes it faster than Bluetooth and equivalent to Wireless USB, a technology which is beginning to get wide support in the electronics industry.
More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7180135.stm
And more about personal area networks on Wikipedia.
