Broadband through thin air
By Charles Wright, March 3 2003
smh.com.au
By now the most hopeful road warrior ought to have had the last traces of optimism excised from their personality. In the past decade or so we've been offered so many versions of the ultimate dream - the ability to shake off the tethers of the wired world and connect at high speed and a reasonable price from a cafe, park bench, taxi or wherever we fancy - only to have them rudely deflated.
From WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) to 3G mobile networks, the reality, if it arrived at all, has been significantly slower, drastically limited in range, less convenient and/or ludicrously more expensive than the hype had led us to believe.
There's every reason then to dismiss i-BURST, the carrier-grade mobile broadband technology that's about to undergo commercial trials in Sydney, as just another hot-air balloon.
Except that in the past few weeks, as the CKW Wireless consortium has been building its infrastructure, it has been getting performance far beyond anything envisaged in its business plan.
The cellular transmission technology, developed in California by San Jose-based ArrayComm, promises to deliver data transfer rates of 1Mbps and eventually up to 40Mbps.
The cornerstone is ArrayComm's Intellicell "smart antenna" technology, which is relatively inexpensive to deploy. Essentially it gives users a personal cell, which follows them as they move around the network - at vastly greater ranges than on any version of Wi-Fi - knocking out interference.
CKW Wireless director Judy Slatyer, who previously ran Telstra's consumer sales group, says the company expected to have to set up base stations every 500 metres in Sydney's CBD, every 1.5 kilometres apart in inner suburbs, and every 2.5 kilometres further out. Instead, using four base stations located in Chatswood, St Leonards and the CBD, CKW has been transmitting data eight kilometres from St Leonards to Circular Quay at 600kbps - four times further than it expected.
ArrayComm recently completed similar tests in Korea, in a partnership with Korea Telecom, LG Electronics and Kyocera. Significantly, it managed seamless hand-offs with a Wi-Fi hot spot network and ADSL and voice-over-IP services.
The Australian consortium, which includes Vodafone, OzEmail, TCI, Crown Castle, and 3Com's CommWorks, with backing from Mitsubishi, last week announced the appointment of a new CEO, former British Telecom executive Charles Reed.
The company will roll out another six base stations during March and April, covering the route from Sydney airport, through the CBD to St Leonards, with some outlying installations in Parramatta and Macquarie University. The plan is to proceed to a trial with 500 users in June. If that succeeds, it expects to be offering a commercial product in the greater Sydney and Melbourne areas, and possibly Brisbane, by December.
The technology is being rolled out on the unpaired data-only 5MHz TDD spectrum offered in the Australian Communications Authority's 3G wireless auctions in May 2001. ArrayComm picked it up for $9.5 million, while everyone's attention was directed to the voice spectrum.
Given that it can host email, virtual private networking, high-speed web access, streaming video, gaming, video conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP), and is thus a direct competitor to stationary cable and ADSL internet services, it could turn out to be an amazing bargain.
Robin Simpson, of industry analyst Gartner Pacific, says although the service's most obvious application is for mobile users, CKW's strategy is to offer it as a static broadband infill solution. "A lot of people want ADSL or cable broadband service but can't get it because they're too far from the telephone exchange or they don't have cable rolling down their street," Simpson says. "It's a perfect solution."
To connect, users will need either an inexpensive PC card, or a small USB modem.
For the mobile user, the best part of the CKW Wireless strategy is that the distributors who will be offering the solution will have to price it at rates comparable to existing ADSL and cable prices. That will put substantial pressure on the rates the telcos are charging for mobile data.
And that could be only the beginning, Judy Slatyer muses. "Wouldn't it be nice to have an i-BURST chip on a Sony Walkman, so you could stroll down to the beach and listen to an American or Asian radio station, take some pictures with your digital camera and upload the snaps over the internet?" she says. "It has the potential to change the way we live. It's what people are doing with cellular phones right now. They don't have to stay in the office or at home waiting for a phone call. This technology brings the same freedom to data."
We've heard it all before, of course. But could it be, this time?
NEXT SPEAK
TDD: Time Division Duplex. A technology that transmits and receives signals over a single frequency band, and handles the traffic bursts associated with data or packet data services better than the Frequency Duplex Division protocol used in conventional wireless telephone systems.
Infill solution: Broadband services that can be delivered to areas that are either not on the Optus or Telstra BigPond internet cable services, or cannot receive ADSL services because of distance from a telephone exchange, technical limitations or their existing telephone services.
Hot spot: Facilities such as cafes or frequent-flyer lounges that offer commercial internet services through 802.11b wireless Local Area Network connections. |
