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 NEWSWireless wrap-up: Carriers moving to 3G alternative in 2002 By Ephraim Schwartz December 21, 2001 1:52 pm PT THE WIRELESS STRATEGIES to stimulate the adoption of mobile data among enterprises that were hatched in the boardrooms of major telecommunications carriers in 2001 are likely to take hold in 2002.
As a proof point that wireless carriers are moving in this direction, Sprint recently applied for membership in the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), one of the leading Wi-Fi organizations, according to an industry source. The fear is that as Wi-Fi gets deployed inside the four walls of most major companies -- and even in the home -- it will cannibalize the 3G plans of the carriers. Although one Sprint PCS executive would not go in details, he did say that the company believes anything that encourages the use of mobile data is good for the industry and good for Sprint. "If they first experience [Wi-Fi] in their office and home, they might say this is good, where else can I do it?" said Bill Blessing, vice president of business development and strategy at Sprint. Blessing also said that there is no technical reason why devices couldn't roam back and forth between the two realms-wide area 3G cellular and local area Wi-Fi wireless networks. According to one source, Sprint will offer high data rate Wi-Fi access in airports next year. An AT&T Wireless spokesperson also said they are looking at the technology. "There are a lot of positives with 802.11b but there are still some concerns including security," said the spokesperson. Jon Auerbach, a principal at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington, Mass., believes the wireless carriers will offer a hybrid solution. "If you are a wireless carrier, you have two options: Build a lot of base stations or build out your own 802.11 network," Auerbach said. "It is unlicensed and they can tie that back into their [3G] network." Auerbach added that most carriers are going ahead with 3G but that there are some places where IEEE 802.11b for high data rates is less expensive and faster. "The first place I would look is VoiceStream," Auerbach said. VoiceStream at the end of the year made a bid to rescue MobileStar, a company that was in the process of deploying IEEE 802.11 for public access in airports before MobileStar declared bankruptcy. Its most publicized move was a deal with Starbucks and Microsoft to roll out access points in all of the Starbucks coffee shops around the country. Wi-Fi is currently being deployed within corporate campuses as well as in production facilities. UPS announced mid-2001 plans to revamp its wireless infrastructure using Wi-Fi at a cost of $120 million. The growing embrace of Wi-Fi among users is problematic for carriers. "Wi-Fi is an embarrassment to the carriers," said one industry insider who asked not to be named. "After spending billions of dollars to buy the 3G spectrum, and millions more to deploy the infrastructure, they end up with a service that is much slower than Wi-Fi." The IEEE 802.11b standard has data rates of 11Mbps, and the just-approved IEEE 802.11a has a performance rating of 54Mbps. Meanwhile, the foot soldiers of wireless deployment are the hardware and software vendors whose products must be re-architected to allow users access to mission critical applications over the 802.11a/b networks. Although the carriers are reticent about their next moves, the strategies hatched on the part of IT suppliers to foster adoption of wireless data were a bit more transparent by the end of 2001. From a hardware and software perspective, the single largest issue preventing a mass corporate adoption of wireless data services and applications is the independent, fragmented proprietary technology preventing critical mass, according to Steve Yellenberg, director of product management at BEA Systems, based in San Jose, Calif. Taking action, BEA became part of a group of software and hardware vendors formed at the end of 2001 to create a single standard platform for application development, application servers, and client devices. Called the Open Mobile Architecture Alliance, its plans are to use J2EE as the backbone for development and application servers starting in 2002. Beyond BEA, alliance members include Oracle, IBM, HP, Sun, Nokia, and others. On the client side, the new alliance seeks to standardize on a limited number of handheld form factors, x-HTML as the device markup language, multimedia messaging services as the messaging protocol, and SyncML as the accepted synchronization standard. Notable for its absence from this alliance is Microsoft, which, of course, does not support J2EE. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant would rather push Visual Studio.Net as the best-of-breed development environment. And, in fact, some of the same companies in the alliance with BEA and Sun are Microsoft partners as well. "Everybody is betting in multiple camps because the opportunity is tremendous," said Mike Wehrs, director of standards and technology for Microsoft's Mobile Group. "What they are going to give you is a constrained sandbox," Wehrs said about the alliance. "J2EE is very constrained. If a handset manufacturer wanted to put an MP3 playback chip in a device, there is nothing in the Java environment that would allow you to do anything great with that hardware. You could do some rudimentary stuff. No one would characterize Java applications as a rich user experience." And so it goes. The key question for 2002 is: Will the two steps forward taken in 2001 for wireless data infrastructures be offset by two steps back as the industry continues to fight among itself-all the while keeping corporate IT wary of making any decisions until the dust settles? InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz is based in San Francisco.  RELATED ARTICLES  New wireless networking standard approvedSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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