The explosive growth in the rate of adoption of wireless technologies has forever changed the communications landscape for business as well as personal activities. There are no signs of abatement in this wireless revolution. In fact, whole new spaces are being created by the deployment of new capabilities and services such as data-optimized networks, location-based services, and integration with wireless local area networks (WLANs). At the same time, these new services make it possible to envision even richer and more advanced offerings, thus fueling a virtuous cycle and ensuring the continued need for better and faster wireless networks for the foreseeable future. This issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal presents a wide cross section of activities in wireless systems, ranging from performance evaluation of recently deployed systems to the key elements that will likely be part of the generation of technologies to be deployed in the next seven to ten years.