BARCELONA (WiMAX Day). We measure our lives in bits. At the end of the 20th century, we had sluggish kilobits. Today, we count our megabits. Unlike the sheepishly modern J. Alfred Prufrock, who “measured out [his] life with coffee spoons,” we revel in any opportunity to squeeze as many megabits as possible out of our daily existence.

We’re more happy than the world if we can get our megabits faster, cheaper and, most importantly, here, there and everywhere.

It is thus that a technology such as mobile WiMAX brings poetry to our daily effort to attain more bits.

In the sleepy Mediterranean city of Barcelona this week, Motorola offered demonstrations of its latest mobile WiMAX technologies, all cleverly engineered to assist us in attaining more bits on the move.

Motorola engineers built a network in downtown Barcelona with four mobile WiMAX base stations, covering a total area of 20 square kilometres, connected to a 2.5 GHz radio frequency.

The demonstration came in the form of a driving tour around Barcelona, in a standard mini-van, equipped with IBM laptops, and the latest Motorola PCCw-200 mobile WiMAX PC card.

“We’ve made similar tests like this in many other cities,” said Hossein Parandeh, Motorola director of marketing, who road shot-gun throughout the demonstrations. “But this is the first time we’ve made such a test in a dense European city.”

Over the course of this week, Motorola welcomed dozens of telecom executives, journalists, and technologists for the WiMAX joy-ride.

Today, during the extent of one such demonstration, this article has been written, published and distributed through a live WiMAX connection. The total journey thus far has taken 30 minutes.

There are other thrill-seekers aboard, each one equally awe-struck with the speed and performance of the network as the mini-van glides through traffic at an average of 40 mph. The woman next to me is watching a BBC news broadcast, another fellow is doing on-line check-in for his flight back to Tokyo.

In this time there has been no packet loss in the hand-off between the four base stations, where the latency was less than 100 milliseconds.

The only “jitter” experienced during the demonstration was by the one passenger who had an apparent over-dose of megabits whilst watching MTV video clips that downloaded seamlessly throughout the journey, due to the average speed of 3.1 Mbit/s down and 1.3 Mbit/s up (ISP Internauntas).

The unfortunate passenger was returned to his hotel and re-connected to a Vodafone 3G+ USB modem using HSDPA, where after a few minutes he returned to normal with an average download speed of 328 Kbit/s, and 113 Kbit/s on the upload (ISP Internauntas).

As mobile WiMAX networks start to go live around the world this year, we need to prepare ourselves not for the revolutionary experience of blazing fast anywhere personal broadband, but for our eventual complacency with such speeds and our inevitable yearning for gigabits.