Wireless won’t wane

Trade

1 April 2005

Time was when the word ‘wireless’ evoked images of a large box-like object with Bakelite knobs and a dial with odd markings, such as ‘Light’, ‘Home’, ‘Luxembourg’ and ‘Athlone’. Today, the term wireless evokes an entirely different image: that of computers exchanging data across a building or a set of buildings, of helpful electronic devices communicating across a desktop or people talking across cities, countries or even continents. So what happened? Simple. Wireless grew up!

Though what do we mean by wireless. Technically it means any form of communication that does not involve cables. It could be an optical, an infra-red or a sonic connection. However, for the purposes of this article, we shall mainly be looking at electromagnetic radiation in the radio frequency range. One of the advantages of radio technology is that it is scalable: it works just as well at ranges of centimetres as it does at ranges of kilometres.

Personal area networks
For years, computer manufacturers have been trying to come up with a wireless solution to the problem of connecting diverse peripherals. Infra-red (IrDA) is still quite popular and features on many mobile phones, PDAs and laptop computers. While it is useful, it has its drawbacks. For a start the two devices must not just have a clear line of sight, but they must also be properly aligned with one another.

For years, infra-red was more common than radio for short-range wireless communication between devices. But the balance is now shifting towards radio, particularly now that Bluetooth standard has emerged for short distance wireless connection between computers and peripheral devices. Developed and supported by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), which has in excess of 1,500 member companies and individuals, including industry leaders such as 3Com, Agere, Ericsson, IBM Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Toshiba, the standard was first proposed in 1998.

Operating in the unlicensed 2.4GHz band, Bluetooth devices have an effective wireless communication range of about 9m. This makes it ideal for peer-to-peer communication such as computer-printer, phone-laptop, headset-phone etc. ‘From HP’s perspective, we are not driving the Bluetooth market,’ says Bernard Roche, pre-sales technical consultant with HP. ‘However, it is a technology that is being requested. Microsoft is looking to eliminate the serial and parallel ports [in PCs] and Bluetooth addresses that. 

‘If you look at what USB has done in relation to serial and parallel ports, Bluetooth hopes to build on that. Whether or not it succeeds is not for us to say, but we have to make sure that all of our products are Bluetooth enabled.’

The biggest driving factor in the adoption of Bluetooth will more than likely be the mobile phone, says Roche. On average, mobile phone users replace their handsets every 18 months and the HP consultant predicts that, as Bluetooth technology becomes standard for mobiles, people will start to look for it on other peripherals as well. Roche is not alone in his optimism: two US technology analysts are predicting strong growth for the technology. According to Dataquest, 4m Bluetooth chipsets were told, and the analyst predicts that in 2002 shipments of Bluetooth chipsets will reach 36m and will each 186m in 2003.

Another analyst, Cahners In-Stat, forecasts that when final sale figures for 2001 are fully compiled, Bluetooth chipset shipments will be as high as 13m units. Cahners In-Stat predicts that by 2005 this will reach 780m – the bad news is that 12 months earlier, Cahners had set their Bluetooth sales predictions for 2005 at 1.4bn.

Nevertheless, Bluetooth’s prospects will be strengthened by the news that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is to use it as the basis for its proposed IEEE 802.15 standard.

Bluetooth blues
The further development of Bluetooth has been slightly held back by a number of factors. The economic downturn has reduced the overall demand for electronic and wireless devices and there has been a lack of suitable Bluetooth drivers to run on PCs with the Windows XP operating system. However, the biggest threat to the Bluetooth standard is the competition it faces from Wireless LAN technology.

The last 24 months have seen an explosive growth in the adoption of the WLAN standard IEEE 802.11b. Both standards use the 2.4GHz radio frequency, so there can be inevitable interference between Bluetooth and WLAN devices. 

‘If you have a laptop with a WLAN connection and a Bluetooth device like a Jornada and they both try to transmit at the same time, the Bluetooth will succeed and the WLAN will drop back,’ says HP’s Roche. ‘It only affects you about 12.5 percent of the time. It’s not a solvable problem, but we are working to minimise it.’

Wi-Fi
The 802.11b standard offers an 11Mbit/s connection and integrates nicely with existing Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) networks. Growth in recent years has been spurred by a fall in prices and the work of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance in ensuring that different manufacturers products can work together.

The WECA – whose members include 3Com, Apple, Compaq HP, IBM and Proxim – uses the term ‘Wi-Fi’ to signify that equipment conforms to the necessary standards. ‘The term stands for Wireless Fidelity,’ says Brian C. Grimm, spokesman for the WECA. ‘When consumers use a product they want a favourable experience. The Fidelity refers to the interoperability [of the product] out of the box. As long as products have the Wi-Fi logo they will work together without fail.’

The fact that devices, which fall into two categories, base stations and network interface cards (NICs), are now interoperable across manufacturers has made the market much more competitive. A NIC, which would have cost in the region of $600 only a few years ago, can now be purchased for less than $100 and the price is set to fall even further with IDC predicting a fall to around $60 by the middle of this year.

The ubiquity of the technology can also be seen in the fact that major PCs manufacturers are making their products wireless-ready as standard. Dell for instance builds antennae into all their laptops so all the user has to do is add a card. IBM has even gone one step further and has integrated a NIC into the motherboard of some of its Thinkpad products.

Like Bluetooth, the technology is set to undergo massive growth. ‘We spend about 30 percent of our time talking to people about wireless,’ says Ray O’Connor of 3Com Ireland. ‘Based on that information, logic would seem to suggest that it is going to explode. There are loads of applications for things like medicine, retail, education and so on. We are working closely with the National Council for Technology in Education.’

Michael Galvin, Regional Manager for Cisco agrees with the optimistic prognosis. ‘By 2003, 20 per cent of building-to-building communication and 25 per cent of client-end user communication will be by wireless,’ he says, quoting figures from the Meta Group. ‘We are expecting the European, Middle East and Africa market for this technology to grow by 100 percent during 2002. The vertical markets are where we would see the major opportunities.’

According to Roche, the HP perspective is slightly different. ‘We got a shock because people we thought would take it up didn’t,’ he says. ‘One of biggest markets we have are people around town who couldn’t put down cables because the buildings their offices are in are protected.’ 

In common with other players however, HP sees the healthcare industry as being a significant market for wireless technologies. ‘After that just run of the mill: general offices, people who do exhibitions and universities. Wireless is still in the adoption phase and people tend to be more cautious.’

Security
A key reason for that caution has been security. After all, if someone wants to eavesdrop on a cabled network they have to gain access to the cable and physically splice into it. Signals on a wireless network, however, can be picked up by anyone with a suitably equipped radio receiver.

The 802.11b standard includes a security measure called Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP). However, the original iteration of this, which used a 40bit key, was found to have a weakness. Since then 128bit WEP has been introduced. Nevertheless, a number of manufacturers are offering proprietary methods of securing their customers’ data streams.

Cisco, for instance, uses a centralised user-based authentication system integrated with network logon, a dynamic 128bit WEP and hardware encryption to differentiate itself. Future plans include rogue AP detection and support for third party RADIUS server support.

3Com also uses dynamic 128bit encryption, which it calls Dynamic Security Link. ‘Standard 128bit wireless security uses shared codes, which means every portable device has the same unchanging 128bit code or key,’ explains O’Connor. ‘Our dynamic link, in contrast, assigns a new key every time the user logs on or moves to a new access point. Each key is secured by unique 128bit encryption, making a RADIUS server unnecessary.’

All experts agree, however, that securing the data stream is not enough and that standard security measures must also be put in place. ‘If you go for a wireless solution, put a password on the access point and choose a difficult name,’ says Roche.

802.11b is only one of a range of standards either defined or under development. While 802.11b is limited to 11Mbit/s, two new variants will extend that. 802.11a, which has been given the designation Wi-5 by the WECA, uses a 5GHz spectrum. While this resolves the question of interference with Bluetooth and also increases operating ranges, the new standard raises the issues of backward compatibility with 802.11b and clashes with HiperLAN, a European standard that sits in the same frequency band. However, this may not be a problem after 2004, when work on combining the two standards is expected to bear fruit.

802.11g is currently under development and the specification is not expected to be published until late 2002. However, it is an extension of the 802.11b standard in that it uses the 2.5GHz band. This offers companies the prospect of preserving their investment.

Three guesses
Moving up a notch is wireless telephony or metropolitan area networking. With GSM handset sales stagnating and the share prices of mobile operators plummeting, those same mobile operators are under pressure to reinvigorate demand by providing new services. The much talked about 3G services are still a long way off and it is almost a case of anybody’s three guesses when 3G will become available. So much so that Wired magazine named 3G one of its ‘Top ten Vapourware products of 2001’.

It seems 2004 will be the earliest we in Ireland see this much talked about technology. Last December, the Office of the Director of Telecommunications announced the availability of four 3G licences and invited bids. The closing date for bids is March 27 with the successful bidders announced in June. Barring any court action by the losers, we should see services come on stream in this country in January 2004.

In the meantime, two of the existing GSM operators have rolled out, or are preparing to roll out, a GPRS offering. Often referred to as 2.5G, GPRS offers many of the same benefits of G3: higher data speeds, almost always on etc.

Eircell Vodafone’s corporate offering is now available. Users can access corporate e-mail and company information at speeds of ‘up to’ 40kbit/s. Two pricing plans are available. Smaller companies using up to five handsets will pay €5 per month rental and €5 per MB of data. Larger companies will pay €20 per month but only €2 per MB transferred. Eircell Vodafone plans to launch its post-paid consumer product in February with the pre-paid product to follow later in the year.

GPRS creepers
So, if GPRS is already here, do we really need G3? ‘That’s a good question,’ says John Long, Chief Technology Officer of Sabeo. ‘If you are trying to get real IP connectivity, you are certainly going to need higher speeds. 3G is going to be based on IPv6, the new generation of Internet Protocol. Under this, every creature on earth could have its own unique IP address. GPRS gives you always-on capability, but will not give you the same capability that 3G would: an always-on IP address and peer-to-peer communication. With GPRS you have to connect to a back-end server.’

But technology alone will not sell handsets. ‘The key things to drive the industry forward are the services that people need,’ says Peter Vesterbacka, founder of the Mobile Services Bazaar at HP. ‘We do not provide the services, but we work closely with people who do. That is why we have the bazaar. You have companies providing everything from platforms for downloading ringtones, to healthcare solutions.

‘Our main job is to link the people who run the services and the people who create them. We typically have one or two mobile operators visiting us every week and we introduce them to application providers. For instance, we recently had a major UK operator visit us and introduced them to a number of games developers.’

Long believes that it is the consumer space, not the corporate space that will provide the real growth. He points out that the peer-to-peer and data services available today are mostly being used by the youth market. ‘Applications that serve youth, like DoCoMo in Japan or which send photos over the phone, will certainly be winners,’ he says.

Nevertheless it is corporate services that are available now. One Irish company providing such services is JLS Technology. The company is sole Irish distributor for Wireless Knowledge, an American company that has published two packages: Workstyle and Echo. These work together to enable remote workers to access corporate information through a wide range of devices from laptops to PDAs to WAP-enabled mobile phones.

‘Echo is an application-based product,’ explains JLS’s Tony Finn. ‘It works with back end applications like ordering systems or CRM software. It gives sales people great flexibility and is cost effective.’

While Echo manages the applications, Workstyle manages the content so that it can be accessed by any device capable of running a Web browser. This could be a laptop or desktop computer, a PDA or even a WAP-enabled phone.’

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