 |  |
| |
|
|
Receive posts to this site via email daily or individually. More info.
Schlotzsky’s files for Chapter 11 protection, but it’s not the Wi-Fi that did it: Before the wags weigh in, there’s no connection between Schlotzsky’s aggressive and cool free Wi-Fi rollout and their Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization filing yesterday. The Motley Fool notes that the CEO (a smart guy that I met when he served on a panel I moderated last year) and an SVP were removed from their positions but remain on the board. The chain has lost a more than 200 stores out of 760 in 1999.
But don’t blame it on the Wi-Fi.
Boingo partners with ICOA, expands to 75 airports: The battle for road warriors hearts and minds starts and ends in the airport. Boingo now has a roaming deal for all six of Icoa’s airports, and 69 others worldwide. The other day, I noted that SBC had signed up to resell access at or operate service in many of the U.S. airports that offer service. If they broker a few more deals, they could have the only comprehensive airport service plan.
A colleague of mine, a technology writer who travels frequently, says he rarely sees people working on laptops in airports. I don’t know how that’s possible, with the gate areas full of laptop users before flights furtively plugged into power. He’s fallen in love with a Treo, which allowed him to skip opening his laptop on a recent trip.
I still wonder how many applications people actually need. Does Blackberry’s success show that low-speed email is the primary application and that everything else is a distant second? I doubt it every time I see a plane full of cramped business people desperately typing away, reviewing Acrobat documents, building PowerPoint presentations, running Excel spreadsheets, and using proprietary software.
Defcon, the hacker conference in Las Vegas held each year, established what might be a world record in Wi-Fi links: 55.1 miles: I wouldn’t want to be standing between (or near) the two points, but it’s a great achievement in the best hacker tradition. The winners of the second annual Defcon contest were teenagers—even better! I didn’t realize the Guinness Book folks were monitoring these kinds of records; they say the world distance record is 192 miles, but it required a Swedish weather balloon. (Or a weather balloon in Sweden, to sound less kinky.)
Let’s not forget the Snipe Yagi, a Yagi antenna mounted inside what looks like a rifle with sniper sights.
Please don’t try to escape your busy lives by visiting an island miles off-shore: Call me Tropos. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no Internet access, and nothing particular to interest me on my Blackberry, I thought I would surf about a little and see the watery part of the world wide web.
It is a way I have of driving off the spam and regulating my network traffic. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to surf the Web as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the Internet. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards Tim Berners-Lee with me.
Apologies to my dear Mr. Melville.
A Nantucket startup plans to install Tropos equipment and use Airpath’s back-end to offer service across 800 acres on the island and out to marinas and surrounding waters. The plan requires public approval because of certain aspects of occupying space. Since the FCC recently ruled that only it can oversee unlicensed spectrum, I have to assume that Wi-Fi Blast, the WISP, needs access to poles or public property. (If not, they should read that FCC decision.)
The article includes a great baseline number: a resort on the island installed Wi-Fi last year at its properties and grossed $16,000 so far this year at $10 a day and $60 per month. About 50,000 people visit Nantucket in its busy summer season. Pricing hasn’t yet been set. Roaming with other Airpath locations is part of the deal, too.
The arrival of widespread WiFi access on the playground of beautiful people and billionaires would mark a watershed in commercial WiFi technology. Hardly.
Panera claims a great title: largest free Wi-Fi hotspot network: In a press release today, Panera says its network of 325 free Wi-Fi hotspots is the largest such free network. They plan to have 500 stores out of 637 current outlets unwired within 12 months. An additional 140 to 150 stores will open this year, and Wi-Fi is planned as part of their design. The press release has metrics on performance: …the average total online time per bakery/cafe has increased three-fold over the last twelve months. Internal research indicates that of the hundreds of thousands of customer accesses over the last year, the average connect time is one hour.
Interestingly, there’s no dollars-to-time ratio: are folks spending 10 percent more who use Wi-Fi? 100 percent more? Less? We don’t know, but we must expect that they do. (Update: Here’s a story from Mobile Pipeline that quotes the chairman and CEO saying, “Offering free Wi-Fi Internet access is keeping our customers in our stores longer — primarily during off-peak hours — and bringing them back more often,” he said. Still no dollars, but at least an affirmative statement.)
Off-peak hours is the mantra of the retail hotspot establishments: they’re eager to fill seats when they’re empty.
Nominations welcome for other free hotspot networks that rival Panera’s, but I think they may have the claim. Best Western and other hotel chains are rolling out free high-speed Internet access, but they are generally available only to guests, and often incorporate a lot of in-room wired service except in newer installations.
SMC has thrown the kitchen sink into its traveler’s access point, a street price $99 device that has the full complement of Wi-Fi options: The AirPort Express ($129) from Apple may be cute and small, but the SMC has four modes versus AirPort Express’s 2 1/2. Express can act as a client (for streaming music and USB only), a WDS relay or remote (to Apple or compatible gateways only), or a standalone 802.11g/WPA gateway. I count Apple’s client mode as 1/2 since it can’t handle traffic over its Ethernet port as a bridge in that mode, apparently.
The SMC—trippingly off the tongue call it EZ Connect™ g 2.4GHz 802.11g Wireless Traveler’s Kit (SMCWTK-G)—can act as an access point, an Ethernet bridge (so full MAC masquerading onto any network), Ethernet bridge, repeater, and point-to-point or point-to-multipoint bridge. (Those last two are similar WDS modes, so I won’t count them separately.)
SMC doesn’t mention weight or the size of the power cord. The Express has an integral power plug, but you can get an extension cord as part of an audio/power kit for $39. The SMC unit can draw power over USB, too. [link via Tom’s Networking]
Wayport reports raising an additional $20 million in private placement: We try to avoid reporting on routine financial events such as funding rounds unless the company has critical importance to the industry or its financial well-being is in question. Wayport told me about a year ago that they were seeking additional funds in a round that would allow them to expand their sales force, among other purposes. That round just closed at $20 million.
I’m not surprised that Wayport was able to raise these funds given their Wi-Fi World retail model of charging announced several weeks ago, which provides them a sustainable model from Day One for unwiring McDonald’s locations, for which they have the exclusive franchise contract. Wayport was also selected as the managed services provider for SBC’s FreedomLink to build out the several thousand UPS Store locations.
In the wake of May’s announced Cometa Networks shutdown due to lack of funds, it’s useful to know that Wayport has these additional funds in hand. Wayport disclosed its revenue predictions in May when they announced their Wi-Fi World pricing model for partners.
A new Wi-Fi Alliance policy won’t deliver judgment on a long-running he-said/she-said argument between Broadcom and Atheros: The new alliance policy, introduced in mid-July, forbids the certification of products that contain proprietary extensions that negatively affect other certified products. It would seem that the policy might finally lead to action from the alliance either confirming or denying Broadcom’s accusations against Atheros, but, in fact, such definitive action appears unlikely.
Late last year, Broadcom alleged that products with Atheros Super G chips, which can employ channel bonding techniques to boost speed, cause service degradation on nearby networks that use Broadcom chips. Tim Higgins of Tom’s Networking conducted his own tests and confirmed that Super G chips in certified Netgear products do degrade the service of Broadcom networks when the Turbo mode for channel bonding is enabled. Broadcom also sponsored a report by the Tolly Group to back up its claims.
Atheros has consistently denied that Super G chips cause degradation in any real-world deployment.
The Wi-Fi Alliance said that its new policy would allow the revocation of previous certifications, though such action appears unlikely. “This is designed principally as a go-forward policy,” said Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. “But we do have the ability that if someone does bring something to our attention we can always look at it.” In fact, he added that the alliance didn’t actually need the formal policy because it could always have re-considered certified products.
If the alliance does decertify products, it won’t officially announce the action, Hanzlik said.
D-Link products using the Super G chips have not been decertified nor does it appear that Netgear products using the chips have been decertified.
However, because the Super G products haven’t been decertified doesn’t mean that the alliance necessarily believes the products don’t cause interference. “By nature these groups are political,” noted Michael Wolf, a principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR. “Time and time again we see companies coming in with their own agendas and they can sway things.” Wolf doesn’t know that’s the case with the alliance and the Super G products, but he says that the alliance’s actions may not necessarily reflect its findings. Groups like the Wi-Fi Alliance are run by the member companies which may be able to influence the group’s actions, although neither Atheros nor Broadcom are currently represented on the board.
Most vendors believe it is unlikely that the alliance will decertify products. One vendor spokesman who asked not to be named said that he understood that the policy was created mainly to protect against new products coming to market aimed at pre-802.11n releases. An Atheros spokesman had the same impression. “They may be marking a line in the sand, saying be forewarned to make sure your products interoperate,” said Dave Borison, product line manager at Atheros.
While Broadcom believes that the new policy was largely driven by its accusations of problems with Super G, David Cohen, senior product marketing manager at Broadcom, isn’t convinced that Super G products will be decertified. “We’ve made the alliance aware that there are some products on the market that may be utilizing channel bonding but it’s up to the alliance to take action,” he said. Cohen is one of the founders of the Wi-Fi Alliance.
He also expects the policy to mostly be relevant for the future. “It strikes me as more of a go-forward policy,” he said. He said Broadcom has gotten mixed signals from the alliance on the issue of revocation and suggests that the policy might need some clarification.
Cohen is convinced that products with Super G chips wouldn’t pass the new policy. “We can say that several products out there on the market today running Super G would fail the new policy. We can say that for sure,” he said.
The new policy wasn’t created solely in response to the Atheros/Broadcom issue, said Hanzlik. “We saw that there would be more and more need for manufacturers to differentiate their products that we just saw this as becoming more and more the norm, not the exception,” he said.
The alliance won’t begin testing new products against all existing products to make sure that there is no interference. Instead, it will rely on a number of sources including its own technical staff, reports from analysts and the media, and members to identify potential interference. In the future, if an issue is raised by any of those sources, the alliance has a formal process to do additional testing or discuss the issue with vendors. “We can engage it on a case by case basis. This is not something that needs to apply to every implementation,” Hanzlik said.
While this policy puts extra pressure on vendors to ensure that their proprietary extensions don’t negatively affect other products, most agree that vendors will still actively pursue certification. Enterprise customers are particularly interested in buying certified products so vendors servicing that market will continue to regard certification as very important, said Borison.
Vendors will continue to aggressively develop proprietary extensions, they’ll just need to be careful about it, Cohen said. “They’re not trying to homogenize the market and say there can be no extensions or differentiation,” he said. “They’re just saying that you can’t cause interference.”
“Dating” in two cities turns into serious relationship between Tropos and Pronto: It’s a natural partnership, and one we expect to see more of as metropolitan area networks or larger hot zones develop. Pronto handles the back-end and the front-end: user experience, account management, authentication, and other details of sessions. Tropos builds the infrastructure, maintaining the hardware. Neither company should specialize in each other’s fields.
This kind of strategic relationship could, of course, lead to firms that have separate managed services divisions through mergers and acquisitions so that they can offer equally good infastructure and AAA support. Many of the hotspot operators provide the back-end and the build-out, like Wayport, but the scale they’re supporting is building-wide, not city-wide (yet).
Analyzing traffic since the start of extensive tracking of this site shows that readers like knowing about security flaws, improvements: It’s a slow news day, and I’ve been looking at traffic analysis of Wi-Fi Networking News to see what our top stories have been since we started using Omniture reporting last fall. Over the last 10 months, trends are clear, driven by Slashdot and other sites that refer traffic: the most popular single stories on the site focus on security — six out of 10 stories. Two were about Wi-Fi detectors, and the other two on unrelated topics.
As security remains a hot issue in the industry in general, you can expect that we’ll continue to follow it. The top 10 stories of the last 10 months are:
Details are sketchy, but New York City may allow six telecom firms to pay up to $25 million per year to install wireless transmitters on 18,000 lamp posts: The article is full of sturm und drang about health effects, but the real story is that the city is trying to counter its dead zones without tearing up the streets. It’s unclear precisely what kind of transmitters these will be, but you can bet your boppy that the goal will be wireless backhaul for the majority of the points using mesh or simple point-to-point. This endeavor could bring massively improved voice, 2.5G/3G cell data, and Wi-Fi into a city without ripping up all the roads once again or putting giant cell antennas on every last building.
The companies include well-known and never-heard-of-‘em: the New York Post says they are two cellular providers, Nextel and T-Mobile, three non-cellular companies, ClearLinx Network Corp., Crown Castle Solutions, and Dianet Communications. The sixth, IDT Business Services, will provide telephone service via the Internet. [link via GigaOm]
Sprint will include a Wi-Fi user interface on its Novatel wireless data cards: The feature just offers a single interface—users must still use a separate Wi-Fi card or their laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi capability to connect. Having a single interface means that customers will have the same experience whether they are using a Sprint-owned hotspot, a hotspot from an operator that Sprint has a roaming agreement with, or the PCS network, said a Sprint PCS spokeswoman.
A single interface like this is surely helpful but it seems that at this stage the market is ready for tighter integration that includes the access on a single card as well.
Grand Haven, Mich., makes splash with full-city Wi-Fi coverage: This seems like yet another city announcement, but it might be the first city with this scale of access that 100-percent live and commercially available. (Dissenters, please write in.) While there are plans for Cerritos, Santa Clara, and Chaska (Minnesota) to have full coverage, Grand Haven may have beaten them to full deployment. (Take a look at this excellent page designed by Ottawa Wireless’s PR firm: it’s exactly the kind of clueful PR that should be encouraged: he’s putting his money—or maps—where his mouth is.)
The folks at Ottawa Wireless sent out a press release full of the technical details, such as their support for 802.11a, b, and g, and the fact that their service extends 15 miles into Lake Michigan, providing access for boaters and marinas. The coverage extends six square miles across the town, and it’s optimized to handle VoIP; a beta test is in progress right now that will cost $30 per month for unlimited calling nationwide.
The service has 300 subscribers at its formal launch out of a local population of 12,000. However, th town sees two million—yes, million—visitors a year. Customers include the city, and public safety and health groups will eventually use the network.
Ottawa Wireless cleverly layers applications and specific performance statements on top of its network, providing VPN, wireless video monitoring, and what they call 55 mph access—even while you’re speeding across the lake, you can still use Wi-Fi.
Service costs $20 per month for 256 Kbps, $45 for 512 Kbps, and $80 for 1 Mbps access. Day rates run from $5 for a single day to $17 for seven days (less than $2.50 per day), obviously aimed at the vacationer who spends a week or several weeks in town or on the lake.
For $25 per month, you can get unlimited in-town roaming as a plan, or, if you spend $200 upfront, you get 256 Kbps service in your home, plus a home wireless network, and unlimited roaming. That’s a good bundle. The 512 Kbps and 1 Mbps business services include one account for unlimited in-town roaming.
My friends and colleagues Richard and Angie recently passed through Grand Haven as part of their 8,000-mile RV trip and vouched for the service.
AUT will rely on Reach Wireless to install a campus-wide, commercial hotzone: In the U.S., we’re used to universities and other educational institutions installing Wi-Fi as part of their basic infrastructure, including the cost of operation out of their physical plant or IT budget, alum fund, students fees (partly hidden), or other endowments. Auckland, New Zealand’s technology institute has turned to commercial operator Reach Wireless, which employs RoamAD’s quasi-mesh/cell Wi-Fi architecture, to deploy a hotzone across campus and handle the finances.
AUT will own the infrastructure and carry the hotzone’s traffic over its own Internet feed. But Reach Wireless will operate the service, collect fees, and provided customer and billing support. Students and faculty will be charged NZ$16.95 (US$10.50) per month. Existing Reach customers and the general public will also be able to use the campus network. Current subscribers won’t pay extra for access; vice-versa, AUT affiliated subscribers will have Reach within reach at a small additional cost off campus.
Here’s the kicker from a press release: The network was designed in one day and deployed in less than a week.
Nigel Ballard of Personal Telco reports that Portland (Oregon) International Airport will have free Wi-Fi: Ballard told an audience at a meeting of the community wireless group this evening that the Port of Portland will turn on 25 access points by Oct. 1 to offer free service at gates and check-in areas. They’re committed to covering the cost of operation for the first year, and then re-evaluating whether fees would be added. Ballard is part of the Portland Telecommunications Steering Committee, and an active community networker and commercial infrastructure builder.
The NY Times follows some of those wires (and wireless signals) around the DNC’s FleetCenter home: This thorough report by Seth Schiesel follows some of the complexity managing wired and frequencies at an event of the scale of the DNC. After reading this article, I’m amazed that anything manages to work. Other stories in this vein indicate that thousands of miles of wire were pulled for this week, while the RNC venue in New York might top 40,000 miles because of some slightly longer distances involved in two spaces being used.
The Wi-Fi problem is clearly explained, and it appears that the planners did hope to reserve space for Wi-Fi. I’m guessing that the wireless equipment used by camera operators is incredibly noisy, spewing out far more than is legal out-of-band (slop-over) signal. Because Wi-Fi has such a low amount of legal signal, it’s very likely that the electronic newsgathering (ENG) is treading all over its neighbor’s space. There should be at least a few clear Wi-Fi channels.
The network is apparently geared to handle the equivalent of 3,000 T-1 lines—but tell that to my buddy who not only didn’t get his paid-for T-1 line drop, but was told there was nothing that Verizon could do about it.
A number of outlets are critical of the Motorola Wi-Fi/cell phone: TechDirt and TheFeature emphasize how limited the phone’s use will be because it only operates on 802.11a. Also, as we noted yesterday, it sounds like this platform would make a tough sell because it requires APs from Avaya and Proxim or upgrades to existing Proxim APs.
The solution isn’t ideal and neither is the HP/T-Mobile device, which doesn’t include voice capabilities over Wi-Fi. These are pretty typical first attempts and they’ll certainly improve with future iterations. However, the enterprise solutions like Motorola’s will have a tough road ahead of them. Cellular operators are typically very slow to embrace change, especially anything that may be perceived as threatening their voice business, which voice over Wi-Fi may. I’ll be interested to see which operator Motorola actually launches this with and which enterprises actually use it.
Motorola, Avaya, and Proxim, today introduced an enterprise platform that enables voice roaming between enterprise WLANs and the wide area cellular networks: The solution includes a new handset from Motorola that looks like a typical cellular flip phone but can support voice over WLAN as well as voice over a GSM network. As part of the solution, enterprises must implement APs built by Proxim and Avaya, a call manager gateway from Motorola that enables the handoff between the networks, and an Avaya IP-PBX.
The phone automatically reverts to the WLAN when it’s available and can seamlessly hand off calls from the WLAN to a GSM network as a user moves between them. While it looks like a cell phone, it features a lot of the capabilities of a desk phone such as buttons for mute, hold, and speakerphone. It runs Win CE so can support Microsoft .Net applications and it includes a VPN. The gateway enables push-to-talk while users are covered by the WLAN.
The platform offers some features that aren’t available on the PDA introduced yesterday by HP and T-Mobile, namely voice over WLAN. “It’s exciting to see the HP/T-Mobile solution, but it’s an iPaq that has GSM voice on it,” said Chris White, director of business development for enterprise seamless mobility with Motorola. “It doesn’t do VOIP except with a softphone.”
In addition, because of that WLAN voice capability, the Motorola solution supports a single phone number that rings for users regardless of the network they are connected to. Users can also use a single mailbox and access many of the same PBX-type features both inside the office over the WLAN and outside on a GSM network.
I originally thought, as reported here earlier, that one major difference between the HP handheld and the Motorola phone was GPRS but it turns out that the Motorola phone does also support GPRS. Motorola doesn’t mention GPRS in its press release and didn’t mention GPRS during its hour-long conference call this morning. It’s surprising that Motorola would want to bury that fact.
Another interesting difference between the HP device and the Motorola phone is that the Motorola phone operates on 802.11a. Motorola and Avaya spokespeople said they chose 802.11a because the networks can handle more capacity than the other flavors of 802.11.
Sales, which will be handled at least initially by Avaya and not a cell phone operator, might be challenging because the decision to implement such a solution is complicated. An enterprise would have to decide to potentially switch existing cell phone users in the company to whichever GSM operators may support the phone—the companies haven’t said which may support it. It also presumably means that a company might grapple with feeling the need to sign up additional cellular users in an effort to standardize on the phone.
The decision also may be more complicated for enterprises that already have WLANs. This solution requires companies to either upgrade existing Proxim APs or deploy new APs, which will support both the voice calls and existing laptop or other handheld based data access. However, as part of this announcement, Motorola said it is forming an industry group to standardize such platforms so that end users might have the option of using different vendors. It will remain to be seen if other companies will be interested in following Motorola’s lead.
The solution will be available some time later this year and it will be introduced with a carrier which has not yet been named.
Reports from the field indicate that the Democratic National Convention Wi-Fi coverage is abysmal, other connectivity hard to find: Contrary to pre-event reports, there is Wi-Fi at the DNC. However, they haven’t done much to make it robust, and the ENG (electronic news gathering) spectrum overlap is probably killing the signal, too. (ENG is a secondary licensed user across some of the Wi-Fi band.) Some reports indicate that wise consumers came equipped with cell data cards. Slow, but apparently reliable.
My colleague Dave Sifry called earlier today from the floor, bemoaning the lack of consistent service. He and colleagues called around Boston to try to find 802.11a or a/g access points, which use the 5 GHz band—which would have no overlap in the convention center. None to be had.
Blogging and Wi-Fi go hand in hand like ham and rye, mom and apple pie…Kerry and Edwards? Take away wireless access from a blogger, and it’s just a guy or gal with a laptop.
Dave Winer, an ur-blogger covering the convention, quotes an email from a DNC coordinator who notes that Wi-Fi (with the delightful name of Corky1221) will be in the blogger area. Here’s a blog by the guy who appears responsible for the Wi-Fi network with a lot of detail on what he’s contending with. Oddly, he complains about 31 users on a single base station, which is a trivial number of users even for most consumer models to handle, and he’s working with Ciscos: the giveaway is that he talks about using a WLSE, which is Cisco’s aggregation product that works only with their own access points. The fellow sounds remarkably technical adept—but you can only cope with ENG overlap to some degree.
The DNC should have gone 802.11a or a/g, and simply said, look, if you want reliable connectivity, you’re going to have to spend $80 on this card or something like it. Even Mac users could get an Atheros-based card from NetGear or D-Link and use OrangeWare’s driver for 802.11a. Otherwise, plug in.
Airports are finally getting the Wi-Fi religion, but only 19 of top 50 airports have service; 6 are deciding on vendors: I know regular readers of this site are used to seeing my byline on any Wi-Fi obsessive article in the New York Times, but I can’t be everywhere. Jane Levere writes an extremely tight wrap-up on the current and future state of Wi-Fi in airports, focusing on pricing, utility, and the lack of roaming plans.
As noted earlier today, SBC has signed roaming agreements with a number of airport providing hotspot operators: if it added Sprint PCS and AT&T Wireless’s locations, it would have the hat trick. But until SBC actually adds it’s newest partners into their network and signs additional locations, we’ve got a pretty scattered set of airports under any given plan.
One item not mentioned that affects Wi-Fi in airports is the airlines and concessionaires sudden ability to put in their own networks per a recent FCC clarification that only they can regulate unlicensed spectrum, not landlords or airport authorities. This report is just a month old, and I’m sure that airlines, retail shops, and other tenants of airports are still digesting the decision and beating airport authorities over the head about it. We’ll very likely see a number of interesting airport options that crop up with that artificial landlord restriction removed. The authorities may try to keep a lid on through other methods, but the FCC handed tenants a blunt instrument.
(Now, don’t get on me about spectrum etiquette and coordination. It’s a good idea. If you have 20 networks operating in a small space all on the same channel—very bad. Tragedy of the commons. And so forth. But etiquette is enforced when no one gets utility unless everyone cooperates. Prisoner’s Dilemma and all that. Thus, spectrum coordination for unlicensed use can happen ante or post facto.)
They’re late to the game, but they’re ready to party: It’s a funny thing. When SBC Communications first announced their FreedomLink plans last year with plans build 6,000 hotspots over a couple of years, it seemed like yet another announcement of large numbers with no track record. Cometa was still on its 20,000 hotspots prediction and had only a handful. McDonald’s hadn’t decided its partner and was in limited trials. Wayport seemed stuck on hotels. And T-Mobile stayed focused—as it still does—on a few ubiquitous chains.
In the space of a few months, SBC has moved from last man in, to practically first mover. Let’s review:
SBC has not so quietly assembled what will be the largest roaming network with a flat-rate price in about two to three months from now and then grow much larger than any other network in the U.S. They’ve set a good price. They have bundling deals yet to come. And they cover plenty of business territory with hotels, airports, and other venues.
Could it be that SBC drives other telcos into reselling and building Wi-Fi on a scale that’s only been hyped before now? Or will SBC’s drive be a strategy they follow alone, leaving T-Mobile with its private network (resold only to iPass), and aggregators like Boingo selling all the pieces outside of Wayport’s retail Wi-Fi World locations and SBC’s FreedomLink exclusive venues?
The test of whether a build out will happen is whether the money and commitment is there. Cometa had the commitment, not the money. Ditto, MobileStar. T-Mobile had both and has built out everything they promised when they formally launched Starbucks networks. We’ll see if SBC follows suit, but there’s no denying that they throw the cash around when it has this many positive strategic implications for them to retain customers, receive incremental revenue from existing customers, and provide a long-term data and voice game plan for them.
T-Mobile and HP said today that they’d start selling a new handheld that includes GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth later this summer: There are some combined cellular/Wi-Fi PDAs being sold in Japan and probably one or two here too, but this will be one of the first major launches by an operator.
One of the more interesting aspects of this announcement is the type of pricing deal T-Mobile will introduce when the device becomes available. It will offer a plan that includes a bucket of voice minutes plus unlimited use of GPRS and Wi-Fi. The whole plan will cost under $100. Some of the cellular operators have been charging around $80 a month for unlimited cell data using data cards, though those prices have been dropping recently. Data plans on cell phones have been less expensive, but presumably users aren’t downloading PowerPoint presentations on their cell phones, unless they are connecting to their laptops, which the operators frown upon. So while the $100 figure from T-Mobile seems like a good deal by comparison and because it includes voice, Wi-Fi, and cell data, it’s still pretty steep when you compare it to what people pay for high-speed access in their homes. Users will likely expect to pay a premium for the benefit of using mobile data, but this might be too much of a premium.
While the analysts I spoke to seemed pretty excited about the idea of a device that includes cell data and Wi-Fi, I suspect that the audience for this device will be relatively small. The PDA market in general has been shrinking, and the market for this device will be a subset of the overall PDA market. Still, the analysts I talked to were bullish on future versions of such devices that allow more seamless roaming and voice over Wi-Fi to reach a far larger market.
Tank McNamara tackles the difficult topic of Wi-Fi in ball parks: One of my surprise favorite comic strips (by Jeff Millar and Bill Hinds) puts a good spin on a what-if for ballpark fans with laptops. Mayhem results.
Drazen Pantic used off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware and software combined with a community Wi-Fi network to broadcast to live television: Citizen videobloggers take note. Pantic describes the system he used (drawn as a simple schematic not much more complicated than the actual installation) to perform a live, public-access television broadcast managed by him and two colleagues. The topic? How they were doing what they were doing, of course.
Pantic’s essay walks through the drop in price, increase in quality, and proliferation of open-source tools and patent-free/license-free standards that can allow practically anyone to produce streaming, broadcast quality television or recorded digital video for later editing and airing.
We established a wireless connection through a local, public WiFi network maintained by the non-profit NYC Wireless, and broadcast from that spot to a computer at MNN studios. The video and audio was captured by the camcorder and fed into the laptop, where it was encoded as MPEG4/AAC streams, then sent out as a unicast stream via the WiFi connection. At MNN they played the stream through a scan converter — which converts the stream on a computer into a video signal — then broadcast it live on the air.
It’s not just a sign of things to come. It’s a sign that things have changed.
Cleveland airport gets Wi-Fi from SBC: I should really have left this item to senior editor Nancy Gohring, who hails from within spittin’ distance of Cleveland, but SBC FreedomLink is now the operator of Wi-Fi service at that town’s airport. The interesting twist in this installation is that there will be Internet kiosks in the airport as well as the SBC service.
I’ve had mixed feelings lately about posting every single airport announcement, especially as smaller markets have become unwired: at some point, just another airport is just another airport, unless you live or work near it. It’s a fundamental problem with covering wireless in general and Wi-Fi in particular as it matures. There’s more and more news, and it starts to blur into much of the same. I see sometimes a dozen stories a week about a small town that gets its first Wi-Fi-enabled cafe, or another community project that unwires a park or public area.
This is just to say that the proof of the success of the top-down and bottom-up movements in wireless communication are starting to permeate all media. When I appeared on a local NPR affiliate to talk about Voice over IP (VoIP) and Internet telephony on their morning program recently, the host needed a technical primer in VoIP, which is quite new to most people, but threw around Wi-Fi and wireless terms with great abandon and fluency.
FCC rule allows end-users to change out antennas on their Wi-Fi and other gear legally if the manufacturer has performed the right tests and the antennas conform to certain guidelines: Jim Thompson alerted me to FCC rule 04-165 issued July 12, 2004, which has some substantial changes for devices that use unlicensed spectrum, most significantly Wi-Fi. The rules affect devices that operate under Part 2 and Part 15 rules, and we’re most concerned with Part 15, which governs 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and several bands in 5 GHz.
The most notable general applicable of this rule change is in section 2, which starts with point 18: “Replacement Antennas for Unlicensed Devices.” Until now, the FCC has required that any antenna to be used with a device operating under Part 15 rules had to be tested and certified as part of a system. There was no mix and match proviso. Further, the FCC required unique connectors for each manufacturer, and required new connectors to be designed as the existing ones became commonplace.
“Wait,” you may ask—“I can go to HyperLink Technologies or other companies and buy antennas with the right connectors and attach them to my Wi-Fi gateway. If it’s illegal, how can I buy this gear?” Simple. It’s legal to sell antennas; it’s illegal to use them. It’s the same logic that guides the sale of bongs and switchblade kits. It’s opposite to the logic that underlies the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The antenna/switchblade law essentially says that the seller isn’t responsible for all the uses to which a purchaser may put a product. The purchaser is obliged to know local and federal rules and conform to them.
Thus, attach the antenna, and you’re a pirate. Assemble the switchblade, and you’re a criminal. Forget that there have been approximately zero prosecutions for the use of these antennas on home or business systems. But no one wants to be in de facto violation of a law, especially businesses that may considering building out Wi-Fi as part of their operations. The lawyers might look askance, and the companies might have to pay enormously higher fees to purchase legal antennas—if they’re available. Those fees help cover the companies’ cost in certifying the antennas as part of a system, but also represent their lock-in market for legal use.
The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)
Thus, if Linksys certifies its WRT54G with a very high-gain yagi antenna within the Part 15 rules, then a user can add a lower-gain yagi that has all its parameters within those levels and be perfectly legal.
Jim Thompson provided a longer, detailed explanation via email:
“Let’s say you have a (warning, plug alert!) HS3000 that has been tested with a 9dBi omni. Were you to find an 8dBi omni from a different manufacturer, with similar out of band gain (i.e. it doesn’t generate more gain in the restricted bands, thereby causing a system that would otherwise comply with the restricted band limits to ‘go illegal’), you could use it.
“You could also attach a 2.2dBi omni, as long as it didn’t have more gain out of band than the antennas with which the device is certified. You can repeat the above paragraph substituting ‘yagi’ or ‘patch’ or ‘grid’ antenna everywhere ‘omni’ occurs.
“What you can’t do is certify (let’s say) with a single 2.2dBi omni, and then have your customer attach a 13dBi yagi, (without recertification), nor could you say, certify with a 13dBi yagi and have your customer attach a 13dBi patch (or omni).”
I have some suspicion that the recent array of Linksys add-on antennas were certified under this new rule and delayed for release until such point that the rule could go into effect. This rule would dramatically reduce the cost of re-certifying gear for more antennas, and it makes it possible for Linksys to sell a huge matrix of their own antennas at no additional testing cost beyond the initial certification. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for third parties to sell antennas legally for Linksys’s devices, but sales of legal antennas for illegal uses has seemed to curtail sales before this.
Remember that until a device is retested under these rules—and who knows if manufacturers will pay to retest the current generation of equipment—you’re still technically violating the law by mixing and matching antennas. Watch for more news on this front, as devices are certified until these new rules.
The FCC decided to leave the connector rules intact, even though manufacturers argued that it’s so easy to get their “proprietary” connectors from third parties, that the current rules just added cost and complexity. The FCC demurred, noting that it wanted to make it just hard enough to make adding an antenna an intentional act. It gets lost in the furor over unscientific concerns about the risk of Wi-Fi and 2.4 GHz electromagnetic radiation that microwaves can injure humans at sufficiently high gain—far, far higher than the Part 15 rules allow.
The FCC said in regards to the connector issue, “…our concern that removing this requirement might have the unintended consequence of allowing uninformed consumers to inadvertently attach an antenna which causes the device to emit at levels in excess of the limits for human exposure to radio emissions.” Good enough. It preserves the market for pigtails, that’s for sure.
This section also revises the rules about integral antennas for 5 GHz (802.11a and other uses) devices. The FCC will now allow externally detachable antennas for these devices, which adds flexibility.
The FCC tweaked a number of other rules, including one that appears to reflect a change in thinking from its one-off approval of Vivato’s beam-focused Wi-Fi—I’m trying to better understand that section. In another part, they tweak measurement standards. Part 5 covers changing rules for frequency hopping to make it possible for future Bluetooth flavors to work legally in the U.S.
Interestingly, spectrum etiquette in unlicensed bands was discussed in part 6, but the FCC declined to take any action. They gave props to Microsoft for a proposal they might implement in the future that would reduce the noise of devices that aren’t actively transmitting. Some of these principles are already embodied in 802.11h, which was a required extension for 802.11a to operate in the 5 GHz band in Europe.
I converted the FCC document from Word to HTML and linked it in the headline of this article, but you can also download the rule in three formats: Word, PDF, and plain old text.
Apple’s AirPort Express may quickly become one of the most reviewed pieces of new wireless technology: It will receive many reviews for several reasons, including the fact that it’s the smallest Wi-Fi gateway (when you include its built-in power supply); it’s the only one to stream audio in the particular way it does; it includes several interesting features in one wrapper; it’s relatively cheap for any two of its four unique set features*. It’s also from Apple and had 80,000 pre-orders, so it’s a natural. (Amazon.com now shows it not first arriving until August 1, and other sources indicate a three-week backorder. But the Apple Store in Seattle says they should have another supply any day now.)
I’ve been working with an AirPort Express for a few days, and it’s just about as easy to setup and use as Apple promises. There are no obscure settings. Joining an existing AirPort Extreme network was a snap. So was reconfiguring it as a base station and assigning it a WPA encryption key. So was playing music through its attached speakers from any copy of iTunes anywhere in our wired/Wi-Fi office. My officemates threatened to play strange music into the speakers in my office, as any copy of iTunes can use any set of AirPort Express speakers on a network unless you password protect access to the speakers.
Three reviews check in today from well-respected sources. David Pogue walks through the pros and cons of the device in The New York Times, and comes down reasonably heavy on the pro side. He misses having a remote control and notes that it’s odd you can’t play through several sets of speakers at once each connected to their own AirPort Express as you can with other devices. The total of the parts in one well-designed package adds to a winner for him, however. He notes that you’d need two or three other devices to come close to the Express—and in that comparison, he leaves out the Express’s client mode (to connect for streaming/printer sharing to any Wi-Fi network) and its USB printer sharing, which is an expensive stand-alone add-on for 802.11g networks.
Walt Mossberg’s take was substantially more negative because of a few flaws he felt were significant. He finds the lack of a remote-control a total showstopper, and I admit that that was one of my reactions on first hearing about AirTunes streaming music. Most people who purchase an AirPort Express will have their computer in another room—perhaps far distant—from their home stereo system. A remote control is a no-brainer, and Apple has signaled that something along those lines might be in the works. I imagine a Wi-Fi-enabled iPod which control iTunes on a Mac, play music directly from itself, or carry out other network and stereo functions. Another review pictures something like Salling Clicker combining Bluetooth, a cell phone, and the AirPort Express.
Mossberg also doesn’t like the fact that he had to resort to AirPort Admin Utility, a fairly technical configuration tool, instead of the streamlined AirPort Express Assistant to connect his AirPort Express to an existing network that employs what must be WEP encryption. You can enter WEP keys in the assistant, so there must have been a more complicated issue.
Finally, the technology review site Ars Technica offers an in-depth look at the intricacies of the unit. In a long and interesting examination of the AirPort Express, Eric Bangeman is generally positive, giving the device a rank of 8 out of 10. As with Mossberg and Pogue, Bangeman wants a remote control—but he also wants a simple, $5 cable (mini-stereo to RCA) to be bundled with the unit instead of as part of a $40 accessory pack. Bangeman points out that you can’t attach AirPort Express to a WPA encrypted network using the wireless bridging feature, which is a good proviso. If you have an Ethernet backbone, however, it’s a non-issue, but it does remove one of the interesting selling points.
(*Its unique set of features: It combines USB printer sharing and iTunes music streaming with its small form factor and weight along with the ability to act as a streaming/sharing client on any Wi-Fi network.)
Newbury Networks wardrove through Boston for a few hours and found lots of open access points and promiscuous Wi-Fi cards: They’d like to piggyback some publicity on the upcoming Democratic National Convention by noting that it’s easy to find unsecured access point and easy for a Wi-Fi adapter to associate with an unknown point without user intervention.
Still, the real issue is whether DNC operatives and even press will be wandering around outside the Wi-Fi-less convention center with laptops trying to connect to random networks or with their cards trying on their own. It’s much more likely that those attending the DNC won’t take basic security precautions like using a VPN tunnel or even turning off their wireless card when there’s no network they’re trying to use.
Still, with this knowledge in hand—what do you do with it? Newbury Networks says in their press release, this potentially sets up a dangerous security scenario based on the level of open Wi-Fi networks in range of the FleetCenter. Sure. And?
Two stories converge on Connexion by Boeing and Airbus’s future in-flight data plans: Tenzing is folding itself into a firm jointly owned by itself, Airbus, and SITA, a Dutch-based air services integrator and air-phone operator. Tenzing will keep employees in Seattle, and SITA will be the majority shareholder. Tenzing will have the advantage now of this direct relationship with Airbus, which has begun to build Wi-Fi into planes as a standard option. The new company will also focus on in-flight wireless calls, the third firm to announce its intentions to offer or to test out this capability in the last few weeks. The new firm expects to offer that service in 2006 starting on intra-Europe flights where SITA already offers its more conventional in-flight phone service among other data integration offerings, while their high-speed data offering is still on track starting in 2005.
Meanwhile, Connexion by Boeing signed Siemens as a customer, which means that Siemens employees will have easier, and presumably cheaper, access to the service. Connexion is installed in just one Lufthansa plane so far, which flies from Munich to Los Angeles non-stop, but Lufthansa and several other airlines continue their commitment to build out their long-haul fleets.
Japan might tax the use of unlicensed spectrum for wireless LANs to protect market for licensed spectrum holders: The logic cited is fairly bizarre—that charging for unlicensed use is “fair,” which I presume means “fair to companies that paid large amounts of money for cellular telephone spectrum” but not “fair for citizens who own the airwaves and can now not see fit to use them for free.” Japan perhaps has a different regulatory framework than the U.S.
Imagine a bill hitting the House of Representatives suddenly that proposed a consumer tax on Wi-Fi? I think the recall petition would be filled with signatures before the bill reached its second reading. The bill in Japan won’t reach Parliament until 2005, at which point the legislators involved will probably have been voted out of office, or buried under tens of thousands of letters.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 |