(Reprinted from Monitor Magazine April 2000)
By Barry Williams, VP, CDS/PROMETHEUS
What is it?
There is a lot of hype these days about wireless communications, the Internet, and the technology surrounding it. The vision is to replace virtually all of our traditional wired communications with wireless communications for total mobility and global access. This includes Local area networks, POT systems, & Internet Access. The key ingredient to integrating all this is secure, reliable, and inexpensive, bandwidth. By forgoing the high capital and maintenance costs of laying cable in the ground and through the walls of your home or office, the cost of the bandwidth should drop as the technology matures.
What’s really available?
There are many wireless products being deployed today worldwide. However, virtually all the broadband wireless products are targeted towards commercial clients due to the costs involved. Many companies in the marketplace today are working to develop handheld portable devices, similar to a cell phone, which can act as a communications device to access email and a few specific products and services. One such device was recently released which is 3Com’s Palm Pilot VII. With this product you can access your email and just a few online services such as stock quotes, traffic and weather reports. The integration of cell phones and this class of wireless product is just around the corner. However, the data throughput capabilities on these devices are relatively slow compared to the high-speed access that many of us are getting used to with DSL & Cable solutions already available to most home and business users. These products are targeted to niche markets with specific applications and carry a suggested retail price of $499 US.
One of the more exciting prospects for wireless products available today is reliable broadband access. Wireless Internet providers, such as Storm Internet Services, have deployed regional high speed wireless networks to deliver true Internet access and communications capabilities. Storm has already deployed internet connections more than 20 times faster than the average DSL and Cable solutions available today and has announced its intent to deploy even faster products that achieve the same speeds as 100Mbit fast Ethernet LAN connections.
The Internet gives wireless communications an instant infrastructure for carrying data anywhere in the world. In return wireless communications gives the Internet low-cost regional distribution capabilities. This will allow urban communities access to the same communications capabilities as the urban centers.
The ability to put voice, graphics, text and video into packets deliverable anywhere in the world is a requirement for many businesses in today’s marketplace. Wireless communications truly enables the information age by completing the "last mile" connections at a fraction of the cost and installation times can be completed in hours rather than weeks or months. Upgrades to the network are also facilitated because there is very little demolition of existing infrastructure. By simply replacing the sending and receiving radio with newer faster technology, the network is upgraded and the end user experiences downtimes of minutes rather than days.
The same technology can be used over shorter distances such as buildings or campuses to deliver network access to notebooks and desktops without the need for cabling in the office. This type of solution has been available for several years but historically the cost to deploy a local wireless network and the relatively low bandwidth available through this type of connection has retarded its acceptance into the marketplace. However, in the last year or so as wireless technology has improved and equipment costs have been driven down, the price and performance per computer on the network is now very close between traditional wired networks and wireless solutions. Most business owners are all too aware of the costs of downtime on the network in terms of man-hours. CDS/Prometheus provides both wired and wireless solutions for clients ranging from ISP’s to small businesses. The ability for them to come into an office and deploy a clients network with an average install time of 15 minutes per workstation rather than the traditional 1.5 hours per workstation has been a significant consideration in many instances.
Wireless LAN’s also allow the notebook user total mobility within the office or campus because they are not tied to any walls with wires.
How’s it work?
Local area wireless networks use the ISM band (900 MHz, 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz) which are a series of unlicensed frequencies allocated by the FCC for public use. This gives anyone the ability to deploy a wireless network in their home or office without the worry or need for time-consuming and costly license applications. Most of the equipment on the market today for high-speed wireless networks operates in the 2.4 GHz frequency range. The local area network is setup with a base station, which broadcasts information to specific radios within its range of operation. Each computer or notebook has its own radio, usually a PCMCIA, ISA, or PCI card with a short antenna similar to a cell phone, attached to communicate with the base station. The base station, which handles all of the wireless traffic, can easily be integrated into a traditional network infrastructure. For businesses, this provides for simple and easy upgrades of any current network without the high costs of re-deploying the entire existing network. This also makes it relatively simple and painless to begin a transition to a wireless network without worrying about all the infrastructure money already in place.
Wireless Internet access operates much the same way for the last mile of the solution. Basically, core distribution cells are set up to cover a specific area. Depending on the equipment, the data speeds required, and the type of terrain involved this area can be fairly large. This core "base station" handles all the wireless traffic for the area. The base station is connected back to the Internet provider with a point to point wired or wireless connection and the data is then retransmitted out to the Internet. The major difficulty for wireless Internet is that a direct line of site to the base station is required to complete the connection. Because of the ranges involved and the limited penetration capability of ISM Band frequencies, tree’s, buildings, hills, and other solid objects can block the signal from reaching its destination. So careful planning, a detailed site survey, and a relatively rare combination of radio frequency communication and networking technology knowledge and understanding is required to properly complete the installation.
Home use?
Currently the costs for the radio equipment are too great a burden for the average home user to bear. However, prices for the equipment have dropped twenty fold over the last two years and are expected to continue in that vein. Because of the low cost of the distribution especially by wired standards, it is very reasonable to expect that high bandwidth through wireless connections will be available to the home within the next year. I have already seen deployment and business plans for residential wireless service that high speed services currently available to the home and AT&T recently announced their own plans to deploy a similar network throughout the US for the consumer.
High bandwidth to the home and business has spawned a host of other services that virtually everyone is currently rushing to deploy. The current fervor in the stock market over dot com companies that, in many cases, simply have plans to offer products, services, and information sharing over the internet is a direct result of this. Wireless communications will be a major enabler of the delivery of these services over the next few years and may very well be the final piece to the puzzle of realizing the potential and vision of the Internet. Already the projected statistics for wireless users are stunning and with reliable high bandwidth capabilities virtually at our doorstep, the major communications players in the marketplace are scrambling to diversify into Internet communications before their traditional role becomes obsolete.