When Ari Virtanen, a manager at Nokia, moved from Finland to California's Silicon Valley, he experienced a peculiar and unexpected form of culture shock. Like many Europeans, he is used to communicating with friends and colleagues via short text-messages sent using his handset. So he was horrified to discover that in America, text-messaging is almost impossible. Whether it works or not depends on the specific combination of the sender's and receiver's handsets, operators and so on―a telling illustration of the gulf between America and Europe in wireless communications. For while the mobile telephone has quietly been assimilated into European culture, in America it has been held back by industry fragmentation and a quagmire of conflicting standards. Around 45% of Americans own a cellphone, compared with 75% of western Europeans.
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