infonet-economy

The idea behind them is to link research and engineering efforts, pool investments and share marketing and advertising costs, all in hopes of creating a technology standard or platform around which huge new markets will arise for the products of the MPA's members. The alliance, which was founded in 1999 and led early on by a handful of companies including 3COM Corp., Agere Systems, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc., emerged victorious after a several-year battle with three rival MPAs, all competing to create the standard technology for wireless local area networks, or WLANs.