Wireless Warriors

Wireless providers are stepping up their game as consumers and business users become more sophisticated and demanding of wireless connectivity.

Research firm IDC has highlighted some recent trends in wireless usage. Warren Chaisatien, research manager wireless and mobility at IDC, says non-voice wireless usage (for example mobile data for businesses and SMS, ring tones and gaming for consumers) is growing fast.

"Last year, non-voice revenue made up about 15 percent of carriers’ revenue," he says. Wireless broadband remains fragmented in terms of standards, according to Chaisatien. "Today we have multiple startups rolling proprietary and redundant networks -- BigAir, iBurst, Unwired. All of them say their technologies are WiMAX-compliant but we’ll have to see."

WiMAX will not be widely commercialised until 2006, he says. Until then, wireless broadband as it stands will remain a niche technology without a mass market and compatibility, he claims.

Still, Brisbane ISP and integrator Clipper International is one company that is making great strides in the wireless arena, with the recent completion of what it claims is the largest geographical wireless-capable network in the world.

Ziggy Matve, a director at Clipper, says the company’s network has a total capable coverage area currently in excess of 1029 square kilometres in Brisbane. "We’re actually able to reach a lot further than that, but it comes down to what’s stable and commercially viable for us," he says.

Its Queensland network ranges from the Gold Coast to Caboolture and from Moreton Bay to Stradbroke Island, including the ferries that service the bay, and inland as far as Ipswich. Clipper designs wireless networks and the chipsets that operate within its equipment. It’s also the only distributor in Australia for Senoa wireless products. "I spent a lot of time hunting around Taiwan and Singapore for different wireless products," Matve says.

"Senoa was the only company capable of dealing with that distance up front because they deal with wireless military technology and they pride themselves on that. Also, they were the only ones willing to listen when we suggested changes to their chipset to get the noise and interference factors down. That made a massive difference to the range that we could get and the quality of the signal," he says.

Clipper sells mainly to other ISPs, and the company’s two directors also own an ISP called YLS. "We, the parent company, sell to other wireless ISPs. Our ISP was built and designed purely for marketing purposes. Our main clientele is government and corporate and other ISPs. We prefer businesses but we also find residential is our bread and butter," Matve says.

Clipper also designed WISP, wireless ISP in a box, a new product that sits on the side of a house or post or tower and plugs into a network’s interconnecting points, turning it into a wireless ISP. Matve says the company has experienced "about 500 percent growth in our wireless market" in the past year but he is unwilling to disclose numbers of units sold or total customers.

"People now realise wireless is reliable and that it’s not going to fall over every 30 seconds." Matve admits he has not really done much marketing to date, and prospective customers go directly to YLS.net.au.

He claims the low cost of Clipper’s wireless solution sells itself. ‘There’s several ways of providing data into a wireless node. A node on a post or tower can provide up to 250 people for each module that goes into it. If you were to try to provide high-speed internet to individuals you’d have to pay for tower costs on each one – anything from $15 up to $40 to $50.

"But for wireless, you only require one tower, one main pipeline going into it to provide up to 250-plus customers. You can add more modules and you can just keep increasing it, so cost per person goes down dramatically."

He uses the example of a Brisbane apartment block that has 75 apartments in it. "One connection can do the whole lot. That one connection cost us $26 to put in . . . However, we can sell that one connection to all of those apartments. That’s the real difference. Telstra doesn’t like it, they get a little pissed off," he says.

As for upfront costs, the company charges $199 for the install to cover the cost of "customer point equipment", he says. Matve is also experimenting with solar power to avoid hefty electricity leasing fees.

"We’re able to utilise [state-owned power supplier] Powerlink’s towers to operate off but they charge us $6000 per year for the use of the towers. Also if we go to remote places like Stradbroke Island where they have dodgy power, I really don’t want a node going off and losing 250-plus people. So solar is definitely the way to go," he says.

As wireless uptake increases, Matve keeps an eye on the network. "It could get very crowded on the network if we get too many people on wireless. That could become a problem. Our solution is we’re able to operate in the 5 Gigahertz range where it’s not as crowded. We can move from the 2.4 Gigahertz to the 5 Gigahertz. Our equipment operates in all sections of the range right through to channel 12, which is the legal maximum in this country."

And while still conquering Brisbane, Clipper has its eye on Sydney and beyond. "We’ve already been working with National Health in the UK and a permanent office is being set up there. National Health is getting charged 25,000 pounds for a 2K link by British Telecom."

"Now that same link costs them about 2500 pounds if they go wireless. They’re using wireless to talk between sites. They do pass patient information electronically over there, but Australia still has privacy issues with doing that," Matve says.

There are other opportunities to pursue back home as well. "We’re always working on increasing the range and throughput. We’re also looking into the powerline transmitters, where you can transmit data across powerlines over long distances. We’re also looking at making trains wireless," he says.

Integ fires up school WLAN

When Sydney Anglican boys’ school Trinity Grammar wanted to link its Summer Hill and Strathfield campuses it turned to integrator Integ Communications Solutions to install a cost-effective wireless solution.

More than five kilometres separated the two campuses, which hold 1900 students, and the existing telecommunication costs were out of control. “We previously had a 1Mb/s Telstra DDS [digital data service] link, which was expensive and had insufficient bandwidth,” says Evan Hughes, director of IT at Trinity.

“We were considering line-of-site wireless but would have had to put a 15-metre mast on one of the buildings and that wasn’t acceptable to the local Council. So then we were introduced to near-line-of-site technology, where we didn’t need to put a high mast on either campus and we were able to get a 35Mb/s link.” One of the immediate benefits was having no recurrent costs apart from maintenance on the equipment.

Chee-Nung Wong, regional account manager data networking for Integ, says Trinity was specifically looking to get voice communications and applications between the two sites, and to be able to do that with reliability and to control costs.

“This was a bit of a step in faith for us to consider a non-line-of-site product,” Trinity’s Hughes says. “What sold it for us was that Integ did a trial.They tested it and could actually prove that it worked.”

Wong says in the planning and engineering stage of any wireless link it is important to step through the motions correctly. “And step one is to do an ROI analysis to prove to the customer that there is a sound ROI argument for swapping from a carrier and buying their own wireless hardware infrastructure and installing that.”

The integrator also completed a radio frequency site survey where it went out to the customer site to fully understand the specific site requirements in terms of cabling and installation, and the difficulty and suitability of the technology. It tested the link running so they were able to draw performance data off that to prove to the customer what throughput could be expected over that specific link and over that specific geography.

“We installed Orthogon Gemini system. Price-wise, Orthogon is comparable to other systems. There’s a new class of Orthogon -- Orthogon Spectra 300 -- which is a very exciting product. It has data rates going up to 300Mb/s. So if you can do that wirelessly, you’re really looking at almost a carrier-class product,” Wong says.

Hughes says it cost about $35,000 to install. “And the maintenance costs are about $3000 to $4000 per year and that’s relatively minor when you consider we were paying $20,000 a year for the [old] DDS link.”

Hughes says the actual installation process was relatively straightforward, once they got through the headache of getting Council approval to put up a 2.5-metre antennae mast.

“It took about a week from when they installed, getting it working, and all the testing before going live with it. We kept the old existing link still going as backup until the wireless link was up,” Hughes says. The benefits were immediate. The new wireless link was a 30Mb/s link, 30 times the data throughput rate of the old system, Hughes says.

“From an IT management point of view we have now got a lot more remote control over machines and that makes things easier. We’ve increased the bandwidth available to the kids and staff on both campuses and they can do a lot more web-based activities with the better bandwidth.”

He says there is also faster and more reliable access to admin systems for all electronic reporting and Trinity also runs VoIP over that new wireless link for all intercampus conversation.

“In pure financial terms the payback is 18 months, but I’d say it’s a lot quicker than that when you consider the additional functionality we’ve been able to get out of the increased link.”

“It’s harder to put a price on improved educational experience the kids can have because their internet works faster, or the teachers can get their reports done quicker, or the improved staff morale: a whole lot of intangibles that you can’t put a dollar figure on. It has immeasurably proved itself,” Hughes says.

And after only six months in operation, Hughes says there has already been interest from other schools.

Integ’s Wong says the key things to ensure a smooth wireless integration are to demonstrate ROI when looking at technology or carrier alternatives, to complete an RF site survey and in some cases provide a link test with specific equipment over a specific site.

“The third thing is to make sure you have a good relationship of trust and credibility with your customer so that they trust your ability to be able to install this link for them.”

Wireless is a huge growth area, he says, both wireless LAN and wireless point-to-point and WAN. “There’s a lot of new opportunities out there as we wrap our brains around the new capabilities and solutions we can deliver,” he says.

As the deadly chill of frost starts to settle in the low-lying reaches of Bennys Creek Farm, an alarm shakes Ned Sutherland from his slumber. He jumps on his tractor and goes out in the crushing cold to try to save the macadamia nut trees that the wireless monitoring system shows is threatened by frost.

Sutherland’s 100-acre macadamia nut plantation is located between Bangalow and Lismore on the New South Wales North Coast. In terms of farms in the area, Sutherland’s macadamias are a relatively new industry. He is banking on the wireless data monitoring system from integrator Environment Information Technology (EIT) to give him a jump on his competitors.

EIT’s system uses soil probes to monitor things such as soil moisture, salinity and temperature, and wirelessly transmits that data -- often at half-hourly intervals -- back to a central location where it is graphed and viewed online. Sutherland finds the frost detection capability invaluable.

He pre-sets the alarm to go off at a certain temperature so it gives him time to get to the affected trees and irrigate them to try to ward off the deadly effects of frost. “It’s very accurate and very good and inexpensive to run because it’s solar powered. What the probe detects is radioed back to the office or house,” he says.

He hopes to take it a step further so that when the probes detect temperatures indicative of approaching frost, the monitoring system will kickstart the irrigation system automatically and Sutherland won’t even have to get out of bed. EIT first started to use microprocessors in field data collection in Australia in 1981 and claims to be the first in Australia to do so.

“The Department of Agriculture had a problem trying to correlate disease and temperature and wetness in plants.”

“We produced equipment to aid field studies and water quality,” says EIT’s head of R&D Rob Hannah. Initially there were a lot of wired systems in agriculture to run data back but wires are expensive to install and also machinery ploughing through paddocks tended to rip them up.

“Wiring is not a good option in agriculture, so hence the move to radio,” he says. Generally, wireless monitoring systems out in the paddocks require lower speeds of data transmission but they have to be very robust to withstand being out in the weather with little protection against the elements.

They also have to have low power consumption, ideally solar power. “It has to be reliable because a lot of field studies are established thousands of kilometres away from the person doing the trials,” Hannah says.

EIT does some of its own installations in the Northern Rivers area but primarily sells the wireless monitoring systems to people who run irrigation design and installation companies.

The scarcity of water and the escalating cost of irrigation are making people look at water efficiencies. Historically, field data like this was recorded using pens on charts or magnetic tape, Hannah says.

“Then we had solid state memory on removable, robust sealed modules that saved data. Recently there’s emerged a need for distributed monitoring in agriculture, or up and down rivers for water quality studies such as in the Hunter Valley [NSW].”

Once farmers decide to do soil-moisture monitoring of their crops for water efficiency or optimisation of growth, then using EIT’s wireless solution is not generally a big decision says Hannah. “Once they see the usefulness of the data and that it’s going to save them money or increase their yields, then they can justify the cost of the solution.”

On average, to put in a soil probe and a complete radio transmitter node costs around about $3000 by the time it’s installed, Hannah says. “The radio connection is 30 percent of the install. The remaining 70 percent is the measuring equipment.”

Sutherland says it takes seven years for a macadamia tree to mature so it is ready to bear a crop. “A mature tree can give you 20 kilograms of macadamia nuts a year at up to $4 per kilogram,”  he says. Given they are very sensitive to frost, even if the wireless monitoring system saves just one tree, it is close to paying for itself over the life of the tree, he says.

EIT has customers all over Australia and internationally. “We have some of our equipment in the Mediterranean Sea which transmits data to Greece, so it has to be reliable and have low power consumption. In other places they’re monitoring in heavy rainforest canopies so solar power is not suitable,” Hannah says. In those cases batteries are swapped every six months or so.

EIT’s wireless technology is used on the Sydney Harbour Bridge to monitor temperature and wind-chill factor for the Bridge Climb company. Vineyards use it to deliberately alter the water supply to the vines to ‘stress’ the plants, thus manipulating the flavour of the wine.

“In South Australia where there’s a few smaller vineyards together, they install soil probes on the various vineyards and bring the information back wirelessly to one central point, where they will then feed that into a computer into some sort of internet function,” Hannah says.

The system is also used for gas wells and in waste-water management, and EIT has had enquiries about its product from India and Spain.