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Wireless IP Services Put To Test -- BT, U S West bet higher transmission speeds will spur uptake
-- Sat, 13 Feb 1999 00:45 EST
Feb. 12, 1999 (InternetWeek - CMP via COMTEX) -- Service providers got
revved up last week to provide wireless IP services to mobile and
remote workers, even though most services and products are at least a
year away.
Pairings such as BT and Microsoft, and U S West and Qualcomm Corp.,
unfolded their service road maps last week during the Wireless '99 show
in New Orleans.
According to Peter Bernstein, president of Infonautics Consulting
Inc., three factors in wireless communications converged at the show:
coverage, cost and connectivity. "The opportunity here is that voice
will become a commodity for service providers; data will now become the
service opportunity," he said.
BT will use its Concert Communications Co. unit to deliver its new
services, which initially will revolve around calendaring and e-mail
applications.
"When a large corporation implements a calendaring app, the problem
is that people are scheduling meetings that other people know nothing
about," said Michael Druhan, Concert's senior manager of product
marketing. "These synchronization issues are some of the issues this
project will address."
BT said it will use Microsoft's Windows CE OS, Exchange Server and
microbrowser as components of the services, which likely would be
delivered to users at a 9.6-Kbps rate. Druhan said, however, that
evolving standards should considerably push up throughput rates during
the next few years, providing a platform for more robust applications
and services.
Qualcomm, meanwhile, said U S West will be the first service provider
to test Qualcomm's high data rate (HDR) wireless access system. The
regional Bell will offer the service to selected consumers and
businesses in Minneapolis beginning in April, according to Wayne Leuck,
U S West's vice president of engineering. "We are trying to determine
the best model to serve this industry," he said. "Wireless might be a
better model" than wire-based services such as DSL, he said.
HDR is based on Qualcomm's code division multiple access (CDMA)
technology to deliver data at an aggregate rate up to 1.8 Mbps. CDMA is
a digital spread-spectrum technique that codes each digital packet and
enables multiple calls to be placed on a single channel. With HDR,
throughput is boosted considerably without forcing service providers to
abandon their current cellular delivery infrastructure, according to
Qualcomm.
Leuck said U S West will examine how HDR performs when a number of
users access the service simultaneously. "We just don't know how many
users can be supported; but these are the types of issues we will study,
" he said.
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By: Chuck Moozakis
Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc. |
