ARC's Wi-Fi Predictions for 2003 Message 18575764
To:areokat who wrote (53509)
From: Eric L. Thursday, Feb 13, 2003 12:35 PM
Respond to of 53622
ARC's Wi-Fi Predictions for 2003
From ARC's latest "BluePrint Wi-Fi" newsletter with the introductory comment, "By the end of the year Wi-Fi will have lost any sense of being a 'wild west' technology. Along the value chain, established players are looking to embrace it and grab the available industry profits."
1. The installation of hotspots will continue unabated, with a particular acceleration in Europe. Despite continued uncertainty as to the validity of the hotspot service model, as access device penetration rises, and carrier grade access point hardware prices fall further, so these factors will continue to drive hotspot deployment. Europe, which has significantly lagged the US, will begin a process of catch up following fresh regulatory clarity and the increasing enterprise deployment of access devices in this geography.
2. The hotspot value chain will disintegrate and further large-scale, Cometa-style carrier hotspot network deployments will be announced. The hotspot sector is maturing and increasingly it is becoming apparent that a vertically integrated network strategy is inefficient. The coming months will see the emergence of four separate layers – venue proprietors, hotspot infrastructure owners and operators, aggregators, and wireless ISPs, particularly in the more developed US market. This will lower the barriers to entry for wireless ISPs, and facilitate further cellular carrier entry into the space.
3. Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) technology will see increased deployment as a means to manage client access and billing when roaming between different hotspot operator networks. There is increasing strategic support for the introduction of SIM technology into the Wi-Fi space. Intel in particular is looking in this direction, having opened its Wi-Fi wallet to the key player in this space, Transat Technologies. The GSM operators also have a clear interest in seeing this deployed. It will allow them to leverage their existing cellular subscriber bases, all of who are of course pre-equipped with SIM cards. We expect to see SIM-based access solutions enabled by USB plug-ins first and, potentially before year-end, Wi-Fi access devices with on-board SIM capability.
4. Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) features will be deployed in a greater number of devices. Again, Intel is backing this technology, having invested in Telesym, the core player in this space. In Japan, Sharp will launch in April a public VoWLAN service for its Wi-Fi-enabled Zaurus PDAs, using NTT’s hotspot network. However, primarily, we expect to see VoWLAN deployed this year within an enterprise context.
5. Intel will see its Wi-Fi ambitions suffer over the next six months. The delay between the launch of Banias and the launch of Calexico - collectively branded Centrino - will give other Wi-Fi semiconductor players a window to have their dual-mode chipsets qualified with Banias. AMD on the other hand will be able to ship its simple 802.11b chipset before the end of the first quarter, and it will drive penetration of on-board Wi-Fi into the low-end of the laptop market.
6. The regulatory status of the 5GHz band across Europe will be clarified. Currently there is confusion as to the status of the 5GHz band in the majority of European countries and this has retarded deployment of 802.11a hardware. However, it is likely that the Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) and Transmit Power Control (TPC) 802.11h overlay for 802.11a will meet governments’ requirements for spectrum management, and allay some of the military interference concerns. The European Conference of Posts & Telecommunications is also specifically pushing deregulated commercial use of the 5.150-5.350Ghz and 5.470-5.725Ghz bands. A final pan-European announcement should be made following the World Radio Conference in June.
7. 802.11g will see only limited deployment. 802.11g provides 54Mbps data rates at 2.4GHz while maintaining backwards compatibility with 802.11b, but the standard has yet to be ratified. Meanwhile, dual-band 2.4 and 5GHz chipsets which can handle transmission at 802.11a,b and g are now appearing on the market, and the initial cost differential between these and pure 802.11g chipsets is likely to be low. Interoperability issues with current 802.11g hardware will also prejudice its success.
8. Boeing’s in-flight hotspot venture, Connexion, will see deployment on all major long-haul routes. At the end of 2002, Connexion was finally able to announce concrete plans for commercial trials of its service. This employs Wi-Fi to distribute bandwidth to airline passengers in-flight, and a proprietary phased array satellite antenna mounted on the fuselage to provide the backhaul - 5Mbps downstream and 750Mbps upstream. Lufthansa and British Airways have already announced trials, and SAS is also on board (sic). In our view the odds are good that this will open up a complete, new and lucrative portion of the public WLAN business traveller ribbon.
9. Contrary to popular belief, the standard that will see the greatest deployment in 2003 will again be 802.11b. Over the next 12 months, Wi-Fi will be integrated into a greater range of devices. Currently, only mid to high-end laptops, and only the very top-end PDAs, come Wi-Fi pre-equipped, but this will spread to mainstream laptops and PDAs. The network standard of choice will be 802.11b owing to its cost advantage and its ease of integration at a silicon level.
10. 2003 will see the introduction of the first cellular handset with Wi-Fi capability. This will be the start of a major acceleration in access device penetration. The first devices will be Microsoft Smartphone-based handsets, using SD card-based 802.11 NIC, such as the one soon to be launched by SyChip and SanDisk. Further support will come from Microsoft itself. Within six months integrated Wi-Fi and cellular chipsets will be available for sampling from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Philips. <<
- Eric - |
