Comdex: The great wireless debate
By Ephraim Schwartz
InfoWorld
November 20, 2002 12:05 PM
LAS VEGAS -- Billed as a great debate between wireless competitors, the Comdex event here Wednesday fizzled on the surface but seethed beneath.
Chaired by journalist Stephen Wildstrom from Business Week, panelists included Thomas Wheeler, president of CTIA; Jeff Belk, a senior vice president at Qualcomm; Mark Hanson, a general manager for Sony Vaio division; Sky Dayton, founder and CEO of Boingo, a Wi-Fi service aggregator; Bill Clift, Cingular's CTO; and Paul Chelgren, a senior vice president at Nokia.
Wildstrom's first question got the debate rolling when he asked how soon consumers will see "seamless" switching. Seamless switching would allow a subscriber to move between Wi-Fi hot spots and a carrier's 3G data network without dropping a session.
Boingo's Dayton was quick to respond, although his answer did not match up with much of the hype around this supposedly imminent technology.
"We are working on bringing disparate Wi-Fi services under a single account. The next step is to bring CDMA into this. Next year there will be services rolled out, but initially you will have to end your session and start up on the other," said Dayton.
But he reassured the audience that users will be billed on a single account.
Clift was no more specific, adding that the handoff will look "relatively" seamless.
After a round of comments on the progress of the industry in general, most of the panelists pegged the date for seamless switching between networks to somewhere in an 18-month timeframe.
Although the participants remained polite, those in the audience paying attention noticed that the various panelists started to distribute the blame.
Cingular's Clift said that at least Boingo "gives the carriers a single company" to deal with rather than trying to make individual arrangements with hundreds of separate companies.
Hanson from Sony didn't quite agree.
"Yes, but Boingo needs [to do] more," said Hanson, who hinted at a wider problem in his extended response.
The carriers in the telecommunications industry, he intimated, are not used to dealing with the Wild West atmosphere of high-tech, especially in Wi-Fi where anyone with a $400 router can create a hot spot.
Boingo's Dayton agreed at this point, admitting that the low cost of setting up a hot spot makes it a challenge to "tie them up into a single service."
At this point, Belk from Qualcomm chimed in, suggesting that hot spots are not the solution for accessing data and that in fact with the advent of 3G wireless cards for data, Wi-Fi may not be needed at all.
"For the mobile professional wide area data is being accessed in non-hot spot areas," said Belk. "If you think of a wide area of the U.S. that type of broadband [3G] is the only mechanism and is competitive with any technology [Wi-Fi]," Belk added.
The Cingular CTO agreed, telling the audience that WAN is the glue on which Wi-Fi is built. "When the usage concentration is dense enough you will get Wi-Fi. But I have a billing relationship with customers and a customer care relationship with the customer," Clift said.
The Qualcomm vice president quickly added that "anywhere you can make a digital call you can access data, wireless data," said Belk.
"We need to figure out the usage models where Wi-Fi works," said Sony's Hanson.
Nokia's Chelgren perhaps brought all of the panelists back to reality when he summed it up at the end of the session. "The Wi-Fi networks are getting there. The 3G networks are getting there. We've got everything but the consumer." |
