Wi-Fi,
WLAN, 802.11b: Call It What You Want, but It's Here to Stay
- by Tom Dibble
While 3G crawls forward without any sign of speeding up its deployment
in Europe, companies such as NTT and British Telecom are quietly
escalating their Wireless LAN plans. Although 802.11b, or Wi-Fi
as it's commonly known, has been around for awhile, it has always
seemed to be the poor cousin to other technologies such as Bluetooth.
Fact is, it's a stable, open standard and it's coming
at us at 100 miles an hour. Could this be why it never attained
the same high profile as Bluetooth? There was no one to profit
from backing it because it was an open standard. That aside, companies
and individuals are using it more and more. The same can't be
said for the likes of GPRS and EDGE.
Wi-Fi has evolved into a serious networking contender,
and nontraditional network players are trying to muscle in on
the action. Domestic networked appliance manufacturers have been
waiting for such a standard for awhile now. Instead of your fridge
hooking up to the Internet to do your food shopping for you, it
can talk to everything else to find out what its other white goods
buddies need!
No reason why it can't also update each month's
expenditure to your favorite budget planning application on your
home PC; from that, to attempting to build citywide public networks.
At home, Wi-Fi is your wire-free link to the Internet by way of
a WLAN card, and you don't need a license to use it. Home kits
are very cheap to buy nowadays. For under $150 you can be walking
around the house surfing the Net.
Out and about it's effectively a wireless modem
for your laptop. A host of micro-carriers are actively building
802.11b networks in public spaces such as hotels, airports, conference
centers, and retail outlets. Starbucks is again riding the crest
of the new wireless wave and has deployed Wi-Fi connectivity in
some of their outlets. Who would have thought coffee could be
so much more?
Micro-carriers typically strike a deal with a landlord
to deploy wireless access points in the building, and pay the
landlord monthly fees or deals on revenue share. An 802.11b access
point has a typical range of 5001,000 feet. Short range yes,
but these new public networks are lightning fast 11Mbps, which
is more than four times faster than the top speeds promised by
3G networks (that's bearer speed, not consumer speed!) And again,
Wi-Fi public networks need no license and are cheap to set up
and operate, so they will be far less expensive than 3G for the
end user.
The only downside to what sounds like an ideal standard
is that it's too easy to hack into. This security issue will be
around until some heavy investment is made in the space. Configuring
the software provided by Wi-Fi hardware companies is clumsy too.
It requires users to learn about settings such as SSID and WEP.
Users are expected by micro-carriers to manually configure their
802.11b cards (without much support from these companies) to gain
access. So, for the more tech savvy it shouldn't be too bad, but
for the average computer user it will be an unwanted trip into
unfamiliar territory.
Another potential annoyance is roaming problems
from micro-carrier to micro-carrier. Here's what I mean. If you're
sitting in the British Airways Exec Club lounge at Heathrow and
you head out to the boarding gate with your handheld or laptop
still running, chances are you'll be crossing into another micro-carrier's
air space.
You're on their rate now! This means you need to
"sign up" again, and you lose connection in the meantime.
No single micro-carrier can hope to build a large enough footprint
to service customers wherever they go. This has been an issue,
but one that has been turned into a business opportunity by a
handful of companies.
Wi-Fi is here to stay. As for
3G, Wi-Fi isn't a competing threat, but it will demystify to a
degree just what 3G is going to deliver. It would be good to see
the two working together to form an unwired coalition to serve
all devices out there...and hence all your needs. Time will tell.
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media.
All Rights Reserved.
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