Analyst: Craig Mathias, Farpoint Group

Watch it: Available 24x7


Takeaway: Public wireless LANs are going to be huge, driven on the demand side by ubiquitous WLAN devices and on the supply side by cellular operators that see an opportunity to increase their service range at minimal cost.

I'm Craig Mathias, a Principal with the advisory firm Farpoint Group, with an analyst briefing on one of the most exciting topics in wireless today - public wireless LAN access, sometimes referred to simply as HotSpots.

Back in early 1998, Farpoint Group identified public wireless LAN access as one of the most important directions in broadband. Of course, at that time, there weren't any such systems available, but the future trend was very clear to us: mobile users with mobile computers need mobile networks.

And the more broadband those networks, the greater the acceptance and the demand. We think access to the Internet and the Web will become just as important as voice communications in the future - and, just as we all have cell phones, we'll also all have devices that demand broadband access no matter where we happen to be.

Wireless LANs have always been a natural fit with the evolution of broadband access, and they remain such today. After all, wireless LANs are fast, cheap, standardized, and becoming essentially pervasive.

Intel's Centrino effort is clear evidence of the importance system vendors place on them. It won't be long before essentially every mobile device - from notebooks to PDAs to, yes, even cell phones, all have such capability. So, clearly, from the demand side, consumers of all types will be looking for places to connect via the wireless LAN they'll already have. There's no doubt users want wireless LANs, and they'll have them.

Most of the concern about the future of public wireless LANs, then, revolves around the amount of money the carriers and operators will require in order to implement and operate their networks, and, of course, their return on investment.

And, indeed, here in the early days of public wireless LANs, we see islands of connectivity, operated by a huge range of carriers, some large and some small, each with their own billing, marketing, support, security (or lack thereof) and related policies.

It's not all that different from the early days of cellular, when roaming didn't exist and one needed multiple accounts (or even multiple phones) to make it all work. So, the big question is: will this range of operators survive, and will we get the commonality in roaming and billing that we all want?

The answer to this question is important if enterprise users are to adopt public wireless LANs in much the same way as occurred with cellular - something that was critical to the success of the cellular industry.

The scenario we see unfolding is quite a bit different from that of most other analysts - while our colleagues seem to be predicting gloom and doom, we see sunny skies ahead. Granted, operators of public wireless LAN networks may need to upgrade their equipment to support 802.11a and .11g.

They'll need to develop authentication mechanisms to assure their users of a secure connection. And they'll need inter-carrier roaming agreements and billing that works - and they'll have all this because the successful public wireless LAN operators will be, in fact, the cellular carriers themselves.

Why the cellular carriers? Because they already sell to mobile users. Because they've already got the billing, marketing, and operational and customer support systems they need. Because they've been looking longingly at all of that free spectrum that the wireless LAN crowd has had access to for years.

And because they can use this free spectrum to avoid the huge additional expense that would otherwise be required to augment their capacity and footprint. It's already possible to handoff both voice and data calls between a wide-area wireless network and a wireless LAN.

We expect to see the cellular carriers deploy this capability over the next few years, and for voice over IP service on wireless LANs to be a huge component of both public and enterprise wireless LAN networks and services.

We also expect backhaul costs, the financial expense involved in interconnecting access points, to drop significantly in the near future. Such firms as Tropos Networks and New Zealand's Roam AD have developed wireless mesh technologies to solve this problem quickly and economically.

But the economics of meshed backhaul is a topic for another day. For now, public wireless LANs are going to be huge, driven on the demand side by ubiquitous WLAN devices and on the supply side by cellular operators who see an opportunity to increase their service range at minimal cost. Thanks for joining us today for this brief look at one of the most important and controversial topics in wireless.

Craig J. Mathias is a Principal with Farpoint Group, an advisory and systems-integration firm based in Ashland, MA. Farpoint Group specializes in wireless and mobile communications technologies, products, and services. The company works with both manufacturers and end-users in technology assessment, strategy development, product specification and design, product marketing, program management, education and training, and the integration of new technologies into new and existing business operations, across a broad range of markets and applications. Craig has published numerous technical and overview articles on a variety of topics, and is a well-known industry analyst and frequent speaker at industry conferences and trade shows. He is an internationally-recognized expert on wireless communications and mobile computing technologies.

Farpoint Group

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine