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There seem to be a wireless million convergence stories in the ESC city. This is just one of them.
Telecom Italia did not, as far as I know, attend ESC this year but nevertheless there was a buzz on the floor about the Italian phone company's integration of ZigBee into a cell phone using the SIM card.
Huh?
The idea is to handle the same sort of close-proximity transactions that as RFID (and, more recently, Near-Field Communications) using a ZigBee network— and to do more if you need it.
The big ZigBee advantages Telecom Italia sees are (1) ZigBee is an ad hoc, self-organizing network (2) radio range was configurable from centimeters to kilometers (using multihop) and (3) encryption is built in.
ZigBee in a cell phone. Who would have thunk it? Not me.
For more information, check out Tecom Italia's presentation is available on the ZigBee Alliance's web site at www.zigbee.org/en/events/documents/Mar2006_Open_House_Presentations/OpenHouseFinale7.pdf.
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