Intel has been making rather a lot of noise about wireless in recent years, a phenomenon perhaps surprising for a giant chip maker. The company even has a special section on its website entirely devoted to wireless broadband and Intel's vision for the same. Why should Intel care about wireless, or more specifically, wireless broadband?
Wireless broadband is key to diverse trends in modern computing. The most obvious include mobility and convergence. Scratch the surface a little more, and it seems that wireless broadband could be a powerful aid to utility computing and to an ongoing need to do more with less.
Latest figures indicating the rate of WLAN deployments from market research firm IDC imply the market for wireless broadband is also growing. The Australian market for WLAN-related products - such as wireless routers, switches, access points and bridges - is expected to grow 90 percent this year to $43 million and is strongly linked to broadband takeup.
That is not huge, but it is growing fast and it almost appears that home users and business networkers are racing each other to the top. This year, WLAN sales to consumers are expected to leap 120 percent. However, next year business users are tipped to take the lead as 802.11i-compliant products hit the Australian market in increasing numbers towards the end of this year.
Yet customers are confused. Service providers in what was an embryonic market until 2003 are now trying to elbow each other out of the way, proffering a variety of technologies. Each is betting his or her offering is placed for a juicy chunk, or at the very least an ongoing piece of the market.
Take BigAir, for example. BigAir launched in Sydney in March, trumpeting itself as a wireless ISP set to offer the broadband-starved multitudes in multi-tenanted buildings a service that is affordable, reliable and fast.
Jason Ashton, joint managing director at BigAir, believes there is room for many different offerings. “You've got Wi-Fi for short range. You've got mobility. You've got 3G for complete coverage. And then you've got fixed wireless, high-capacity links that provide an alternative to fibre,” he says.
Ashton's outfit differs from many of its rivals in that it specifically targets the 38 percent of Sydneysiders that live in flats. As he points out, that proportion is growing as the need to use a finite amount of land more efficiently becomes ever greater.
BigAir's offering is also being promoted to businesses - particularly SMBs - in multi-tenanted buildings. The 802.11 standard-compliant service is symmetric broadband, which can have significant advantages to asymmetric DSL because it offers the same upload and download speed.
'Point-to-point wireless has been around for years, but we offer point-to-multi-point,' he says.
Other high-speed technologies such as fibre are very expensive to deploy, especially for ISPs or smaller telcos, Ashton points out.
“Price point for Wi-Fi has dropped dramatically and ... we've now got plans to deliver WiMAX,” he says.
Ashton's team has been busy rolling out a series of wireless local loops, using adjacent overlapping cells. Each cell covers about 10 square kilometres per base-station, which are currently situated in relatively central Sydney suburbs such as Vaucluse, Alexandria and Neutral Bay.
Connectivity is then distributed throughout the building using 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet as the access layer. So far, BigAir's average speed offerings float around the 1Mb/s, 2Mb/s and 10Mb/s marks but Ashton expects the rates to eventually increase to 75Mb/s or even 100Mb/s.
“You can't do a self-install, but we can deliver a very high quality of service,” he says. “Compared with DSL, we've got total control of our network. Most people you buy broadband from don't own their own infrastructure. Very few built their own DSLAMs or exchanges.
“If there's a problem, it's our problem and we deal with it,” he says.
Offerings from rivals such as Personal Broadband Australia (PBA) - which also launched March this year - are 'very much' a mobile offering, focused on road warriors, compared with BigAir's fixed approach.
“We're connecting offices or home networks up, not just via a single laptop. We've got customers with 25 servers backing up to the BigAir connector,” Ashton says.
However, he concedes that BigAir has no plans to offer the cheapest price. Customers wanting unlimited, low-cost downloads will not flock to BigAir. “They're not the customers we're after,” Ashton says.
BigAir's service is quite different from those offered by Wi-Fi hotspot operators. Hotspot operators set up wireless networks at public access hotspots, in locations such as airport lounges and cafes. But it is a complete contrast to that offered by PBA's much-hyped iBurst service.
Wireless broadband network provider and operator PBA has been busy signing up distributors for iBurst. Veritel, for example, sells it into the channel as a bundle dubbed Freedom Wireless. Another partner, SecureTel, sees iBurst as a more 'seamless' alternative to hotspots.
John Filmer, marketing director at Sydney-based PBA, says iBurst offers high-speed internet and VPN access to individual users wanting to securely link to their office or home networks remotely. Download speeds have been falling between 512Kb/s and 1Mb/s.
“You can use this technology when you're actually on the move ... at up to 80Kb/s. We're not saying that's a major use but it's very useful,” he says.
The company has about eight channel partners currently, but wants 15 to 20, including big full-service companies and niche providers, Filmer says.
Business users with iBurst-enabled laptops or PDAs can use the service while they are waiting for a meeting or riding in a taxi to the airport, for example. The aim is to get wide-area coverage over much of Australia but today the service is restricted to parts of Sydney only, he says. “We're working on achieving national coverage over the next 12 to 18 months,” Filmer says.
iBurst is available either via a laptop PCMCIA card or a in wireless modem format, he says. “It's not only for mobile workers but they're our primary target,' Filmer says. “But some 30 percent of people who want broadband can't get ADSL or cable so they're our secondary target.”
Traditional hotspots are not so useful because they don't offer coverage when and where businesspeople really want it. Nobody working really has the time or the inclination to go to a Starbucks or McDonald's specifically to browse the internet or check their email, he points out.
“We're already talking through our channel partners to the Harvey Normans and the Bing Lees and some channel partners have signed up but are not yet active, such as OzEmail,” he says.
Filmer says iBurst could also be successful among young urbanites wanting to stay connected that either live in flats or with their parents. Those people could not install infrastructure on their own behalf. “iBurst could help develop ... a home away from home,” Filmer says. “We think there's good volume in there also.”
Customer feedback had suggested that iBurst was better than DSL, which often offered only 256Kb/s. Meanwhile, PBA expects iBurst to jump to 2Mb/s and eventually to 9Mb/s.
Filmer believes that end-user fears about wireless broadband's security are largely misguided. iBurst is as secure as any fixed communications network. “There's a whole set of security [features] built into iBurst's network,” he maintains.
“There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt expressed about things
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