That sound you hear, that incessant tapping on laptops at the corner cafe, the local park and the airport lounge, is music to the ears of the beleaguered tech industry. Wi-Fi, the magical wireless link that lets all those tappers blast data short distances at 200 times the speed of a dial-up modem for no extra cost, has turned into the only bright note punctuating Silicon Valley's indigo mood. Only three years old, Wi-Fi, a once-obscure wireless standard with the ungainly real name of IEEE 802.11, went supernova last year, selling 18 million connections―one of the fastest adoption rates of any consumer technology in history. Tens of thousands of Wi-Fi "hotspots" have sprouted around the country. Some McDonald's now offer a free link with the purchase of a combo meal. In March Intel kicked off a $300 million-plus marketing blitz for a new brand, Centrino, that packages together a new laptop microprocessor with a Wi-Fi receiver.
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