The wireless Internet has been hyped by everyone from the mobile phone networks to start-up software companies over the last few years. In fact the hype was so far from the reality a couple of years ago when WAP services were first introduced that phrases such as ‘WAP is crap’ weren’t far off the mark.
At its most basic, wireless Internet means accessing the Internet on a mobile phone, handheld, laptop or PC without a wired connection to the Internet. The number of technologies available to connect you unfettered has blossomed in the last year or so but there are now three main technologies currently or soon to be available in Ireland — WiFi, GPRS and 3G.
Wonderful Wi-Fi
WiFi is a radio-based technology that allows you to connect your PC or other wireless device back to a base station that in turn is connected to a local area network or Internet connection. It’s also sometimes referred to as 802.11, 802.11b, or wireless LAN but all these titles basically refer to the same technology.
Its use has taken off in the US in the last year thanks to the availability of ‘hot spots’ in public places such as coffee shops, conference centres, hotels and airports, which allow the public to wirelessly access the Internet in those locations. In fact IBM has just become involved in a project to provide wireless Internet access at 1,000 truck stops in the US as it is estimated that about 25% of US truckers travel with a laptop.
Government without wires
Interestingly the current Minister for Communications, Dermot Ahern, seems to be something of a wireless fan. This year his department has already provided over EUR250,000 in funding for five wireless Internet pilots. The projects are in Dublin, Cork, Mayo, Sligo, Galway, Limerick and Louth and provide wireless connectivity in a range of locations such as a university, hotels, specific towns, a ferry terminal and a conference centre.
Minister Ahern has gone on the record as saying: ‘Wireless technology has expanded and developed and there is no reason why wireless access to the Internet cannot be utilised in addition to a fibre optic or other systems. This could provide fast Internet access not only to large businesses but also to residential consumers, small office/ home office and small and medium business’. Minister Ahern seems ready to provide more than just lip service for Wi-Fi technology — there is a currently a proposal that a wireless LAN would be installed in the Dail which would make it the first parliament in the world to be so equipped.
The mobile alphabet soup
GPRS and 3G are both predominantly mobile phone technologies and are evolutions of the GSM system used by all mobile phones in Ireland. GPRS, also called 2.5G, is currently offered by Vodafone and O2 and is an upgrade of the current GSM which makes it more efficient for carrying data.
According to Tadhg Cotter, programme manager for Vodafone Live (the branding that Vodafone applies to its consumer GPRS services), the uptake of GPRS by users has been ‘super, not just in terms of the number of users but also in the frequency of their usage’. This is no doubt helped by the high profile advertising campaign for the service featuring the likes of David Beckham and Michael Schumacher. Vodafone has approved three phones for the service — the Sharp GX10, Panasonic GD87 and Nokia 7650 — all of which have large colour screens allowing for the use of graphical menus and icons. This ensures a user experience much closer to the ‘mobile Internet’ than that offered by WAP on a small monochrome screen.
The four main services offered by Vodafone are picture messaging (aka multimedia message service or MMS, the successor to SMS), polyphonic ringtones, java games and information services. There is however a premium for the experience — the phones cost around EUR300 for contract customers and EUR549 for pre-paid customers. ‘As time goes on we will have lower price point phones, but that’s not imminent,’ says Cotter.
O2 has also been active in making consumer GPRS services available, but according to Pat O’Connell, technology applications manager with the Solutions Group at O2, customers are using services powered by GPRS without even being aware that they are using the technology. He cites the examples of WAP and MMS, both of which are being heavily used, but those using them may be doing so without needing to be aware of GPRS.
On the business side, O’Connell’s group is seeing three key areas where mobile data solutions are being implemented — sales force automation, field service engineers, and logistics. ‘The underlying bearer service for these applications is GPRS,’ says O’Connell. ‘It’s far less complex for the user but its also dramatically cheaper than SMS or circuit switched data.’
Both O2 and Vodafone are making much of their ability to provide mobile access to a user’s company LAN network and e-mail. Vodafone recently launched its Mobile Office suite of products, which includes the previously announced Email Anywhere and a new GPRS card for laptops called Mobile Connect. Vodafone estimates that there are between 165,000 and 180,000 notebook computers in Ireland that are actively used but less than 2% of those are being used in a truly mobile way by connecting to networks as they travel.
The Mobile Connect card costs EUR299, with a monthly SIM card rental of EUR7.50, and comes with a software console which provides for simple access to e-mail, Internet, SMS and other applications from your notebook computer. Vodafone has adopted a sliding scale for GPRS data charges — for very light users (less than 5MByte a month) it costs EUR2 per Mbyte while for more regular users (over 20MByte a month) the cost falls to EUR1 per month. The operator has teamed up with HP who will act as a systems integrator to help companies get set up with mobile applications.
In addition to its Solutions Group who work with software partners to create applications for customers, O2 has introduced two devices — the Blackberry and the XDA, which combine the features of a handheld and a GPRS phone in one unit. Both appeal as much to the small business as the large corporate as they can be used with any POP3 e-mail account i.e. the normal email account you are issued by an Internet service provider.
The Pocket PC-based XDA is particularly neat. It is a fully featured handheld with Pocket versions of all the main Microsoft Office programs but also has a GPRS phone built in. Because it runs a Microsoft operating system it is particularly easy to synchronise with your existing contacts and other data in Outlook, which means you can click on a contacts phone numbers and the XDA will automatically dial it. Web surfing and other Internet are slightly faster than on a dial-up connection which means you can check email when you are out and about with the minimum of fuss. Compare that to the hassle of getting a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone to talk to your handheld and download mail and you can see the attraction.
3 is the magic number
The next big step for mobile telephone technology is 3G which will provide much more bandwidth and thus allow for services such as video phones, streaming video and other bandwidth intensive applications. Licence competitions for 3G were held at the height of the dot com boom which meant many operators sank millions into these licences with little chance of a return for years. Ireland was relatively late to the party which meant the network operators did not pay the same inflated sums for licences that were demanded elsewhere. ComReg, which issues the licence, has since then been very strict in keeping the successful operators to the agreed timetable. As a result O2, Vodafone, and new entrant 3 will have their 3G networks ready by December this year, but a lack of handsets will mean a large scale introduction is unlikely.
Vodafone expects to have coverage of one third of the population this summer but says it will have to wait until handsets are available from manufacturers before it launches a service. Vodafone Ireland CEO, Paul Donovan believes that it is only towards the end of 2004 and early in 2005 that 3G will become widely used in Ireland. He expects that users won’t rush out to buy 3G per se but instead the technology will be application-driven i.e. people will sign up for services such as Vodafone Mobile Office which may be delivered using elements of 3G, but it is the actual application that customers will sign up for regardless of the technology used to deliver it. O2 has also said it will meet its commitments under the terms of its licence, but Pat O’Connell says it is ‘no secret that there is unlikely to be handsets in commercial quantities’ by December.
Turn up the Wi-Fi
While you’re waiting for 3G you can still unfetter yourself from the wires with wireless LAN, a technology that has taken the US by storm and looks set to do the same thing on this side of the pond. In contrast to 3G and GPRS, Wi-Fi works over a relatively small distance from a base station. The most popular variant, 802.11b operates at 11Mbit/s which is significantly faster than GPRS or dial-up. Research conducted in the US estimates that there are currently about 4.2 million users of Wi-Fi in the US but it expects this to reach a whopping 31 million by 2007 — in other words WI-Fi will be the de-facto standard for connecting any form of mobile computing device to the Internet.
Wi-Fi is primarily designed to wirelessly enable handhelds, laptops and other computer equipment rather than mobile phones. It replaces traditional Ethernet technology which is used in office local area networks (LANs), hence the wireless LAN moniker. If your PC has wireless LAN — usually in the form of a PCMCIA card for laptop or a USB based connection for desktop machines — you can access the Internet or other servers on the network without the need for any physical wired connection.
Peter Bellew is CEO of Visitor Based Networks, a Tralee-based company that specialises in providing hardware for 802.11 networks. He is seeing a huge interest in wireless networks at the moment but expects that to mushroom when flat rate Internet access products are introduced by the ISPs this summer. ‘The problem at the moment is the back haul to the Internet. Flat rate will cause a huge surge in Internet usage generally. People are afraid to turn on the Internet at the moment due to the cost. From what I understand the flat rate dial-up will apply to ISDN as well, which means for EUR50 a month you can have unlimited ISDN and that’s available practically nationwide.’
Since the start of the year the cost of setting up an 802.11b network has fallen dramatically and its now possible to set up your own ‘hot spot’ for as little as EUR200 — all you have to add is Internet connectivity in the form of a dial-up connection, ISDN, DSL or leased line. There are three main components you’ll need — a wireless router, sometimes called an access point, an antenna, and wireless cards or USB based cards for desktop machines.
Centrino boost
One of the major stimulus to the wireless sector recently has been Intel’s announcement of Centrino which is a trio of technologies; a new mobile processor, the Intel Pentium M, an Intel 855 Chipset and on-board 802.11 capability provided by the Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 Network Connection. What this means is that new Centrino-enabled laptops from Dell, IBM, HP etc., will have Wi-Fi capability out of the box. Intel expects that by the end of this year practically all new notebooks will be based around Centrino which will increase the demand for hotspots.
While the number of public hotspots hasn’t exactly exploded in Ireland and it is hard to quantify the number of businesses running their own WLAN, it is fair to say there is a grassroots movement behind the technology. The Chester Beatty Library at Dublin Castle is providing a free hotspot for visitors, while O2, Esat BT, BT Northern Ireland and Wayport are all providing commercial access predominantly in business hotels.
The wireless zone
O2 has been particularly active with the launch of its Wireless Zone service with 12 hotspots around the country, which are supported by high speed connections to the Internet. Aimed at business users and international travellers, the pricing reflects this — it’s EUR10 for one hour or EUR20 for 24 hours unless you sign up to be a regular user. Supporting the service, O2 has introduced the Nokia D211 data card which has both Wi-Fi and GPRS functionality, ensuring you should always be able to get a wireless connection as you move around the country.
In contrast to the model that O2 is pursuing, Bellew predicts that hot spots will be free to access in hotels and other public spaces as the cost and hassle of setting up a billing infrastructure will be too much for most businesses. ‘As one hotel I was talking to recently said, ‘I don’t charge people for using the toilet so why should I charge them for using the Internet.”
12/06/2003
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