Wireless Valley is a term that was coined by Professor
Ted Rappaport in 1990 when he was a faculty member at
Virginia Tech, and was used to describe the
Roanoke/
Blacksburg, Virginia region and the potential of research to create spin-out companies. In 1990 he and his students founded
TSR Technologies, a company that made software-defined cellular and paging intercept and drive test equipment that was sold to Allen Telecom in 1993, and in 1995 Wireless Valley Communications, a company that pioneered the creation of computer-aided
wireless network prediction and management software that was sold to
Motorola in late 2005. This term was later used as nickname to describe several regional clusters of companies in the
information technology sector, in analogy to
California'sSilicon Valley:
One such cluster is located in northern
Stockholm,
Sweden.[citation needed] This also included a number of companies that saw themselves as belonging to the new information based
economy.
Ericsson, the
telecommunications supplier, has one of its main design centers in the Stockholm suburb of
Kista.
Finland also has a high-tech area in
Espoo, sometimes called "Wireless Valley", based on
Nokia and
Nokia Siemens Networks.[citation needed] There is a secondary hub located in
Oulu which is the base for other wireless specialist companies too.
A third such cluster consists of the telecommunications formed in
San Diego,[1] based on
Qualcomm
A new high-tech program has been initialed in Nanjing, China, called 'China Wireless valley'.[citation needed] It is based on two national key laboratories of Southeast University.