Limitex,
If my understanding is correct the important thing to realize first of all is that Wireless Knowledge is only one part of the relationship that MSFT and Q are establishing. As far as I can tell the ASIC and device development work is related and informed by but not part of Wireless Knowledge. Gregg should be able to help out on this.
BUX's explanation sounds more or less correct, although ISP is only a partial description of what wK will do.
On the wK website there a some White Papers worth reading Here are some excerpts culled from “Analysis of Wireless Knowledge Svce”:
“The Wireless Knowledge Network Operations Center (NOC) is built on Windows compatible hardware and has been designed to run MS Exchange 5.5 using a server cluster and RAID disk array. THE NOC COMPUTER BACKBONE AND SERVER BANKS CAN BE SCALED AS NEEDED, AND THE ENTIRE NOC CAN BE DUPLICATED IN OTHER REGIONS OF THE COUNTRY OR ANY PART OF THE WORLD(emphasis mine).
“The NOC has been designed to be a single point of connection to provide corporations with access to multiple networks using multiple devices. The NOC can also provide other features that would not be available to a corporate system tied directly to a single network. For example, a mobile user carrying both a phone and a pager could receive a message on both devices. A user who carried a palmtop PC, a notebook, and a phone could access his or her corporate resources using the palmtop device or computer. In each case, the network would “know” the capabilities and limitations of the device in use.”
“Another way to view the wK NOC is as a communications switching hub with the capability to send and receive data across multiple networks simultaneously. This is valuable when you have a fleet of users employing several different networks or using multiple devices.”
“The wK service provides mobile professionals with easy access to their corporate information such as email, calendar, contacts, task lists, and unique corporate info on the corporate servers.”
There's much more in the paper. Read it for yourself.
This idea seems very smart. Carriers and MSFT/Q will peddle the service to corporate America. Tech support and corporate integration will be provided by wK. I believe wK will also provide content a la YHOO, MSN (gosh*&^%$&^%&).The NOC will be the neural center of a network of networks. On the conf call S.Ballmer mentioned that this played right into Q's experience with Omnitracs, which might be why the lead execs are from Q and its's in San D., NOC center for G* as well.
I don't understand why ATT wouldn't want to do this themselves , or IBM. Perhaps they'll let wK blaze the trail.
MSFT gets to demonstrate that NT is ready for mission critical apps.
Another stated goal of the project is to drive wireless application and device development. IMO a lot more infrastructure is going to be required. If this is going to work your phone or CE/Simian device cannot default to the analogue network.
There are things I don't understand. Sounds like everything gets routed through San D. for now, a bit cumbersome, no? Wouldn't it be desirable to have redundancy? How are corporations connected to wK? Do all ones devices use the same address? Can MSFT go off and do this with ERICY, can Q go do it with IBM? Is it necessary that corporations be using NT, Back Office etc?
Dave
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