The Church of St John The Baptist has stood solidly in the centre of Cardiff for well over 800 years. As the weight of history housed in the austere architecture of its walls bears down upon the faithful congregation, a man sits unobtrusively in a quiet corner, boots up his laptop and launches his Internet browser. As the musical strains from the restored Father Willis organ, built in 1894, fill the parish church, the young man manages to connect to the web wirelessly. He launches his Instant Messaging application and starts to chat with his father online.
At 300,000 feet (roughly 91,000 metres) above sea level, Singapore Airlines flight SQ320 wings its way from Singapore to London close to the speed of sound. Between a can of Diet Coke and a day-old newspaper, another man sitting in Business Class smiles at some comment that popped up onto his laptop screen, already connected wirelessly to the internet. The flight has six more hours before it reaches Heathrow Airport, but he is already trading family news with his son on the ground, somewhere secluded in one of the oldest remaining medieval buildings in Cardiff City.
This scenario, demonstrating the startling developments in wireless broadband over the last twelve months, isn’t fantasy. It is already reality. But every player that has helped make this digital communication between father and son possible, has had to pass through a trial by fire individually. The impact of this repercussion has not – yet – been felt to its fullest extent.
Seven parties are involved in the above anecdote. BT Openzone (one) working in the UK has built a wireless broadband infrastructure in St John’s Church with the cooperation of the Parish Church of Cardiff in the city centre (two). Connexion by Boeing (three), a business unit of The Boeing Company and the brilliant purveyors of real-time high-speed Internet services to airline passengers in flight, has installed a wireless broadband infrastructure on board a few aircraft operated by Singapore Airlines (four). Both father (five) and son (six) would naturally be paying subscribers of wireless broadband services offered by individual service providers, in this case, BT Openzone in the UK and StarHub in Singapore (seven).
Seven parties are needed to make sure this family exchange between father and son work seamlessly – their messages flying through the ether without disruption or complication. We should not, however, forget the many indirect influences that may have occurred: from the equipment vendors to the developers and engineers of the technology; from the avid fans to the cynical user.
It is not really surprising to see that this complex ecology of vendors, engineers, service providers, location owners, opinion leaders and ultimate users give rise to the wireless broadband phenomenon over the past few years.
But strangely enough, it is a phenomenon that is not entirely visible to many people, compared to other more prominent technologies such as 3G. Developments in the wireless broadband industry are almost akin to background noise. For every major launch of 3G services by an operator, no doubt accompanied by a splashy advertising campaign across all media, tens of wireless broadband hotspots sprout out like mushrooms at every gourmet coffee outlet, fast food restaurant, airport, convention centres, hotel and yes, even churches. All with no more of a fanfare than a semi-visible sign at the entrance stating ‘wireless internet access available’.
If you are a frequent business traveller and you walk down the main street of a shopping or business district in a popular metropolitan city, you are more likely to be bombarded by mobile ads declaiming a major paradigm shift in mobile communications. Meanwhile, our usual workhorse – wireless broadband – keeps plugging away by expanding its coverage beyond traditional human traffic-heavy locations to quiet corners where a few intrepid individuals pound away on their laptop keyboards, taking sips of coffee or tea in between.
However, despite Wifi’s continued growth, like any individual who has attained some level of maturity, there will come a time where personal ambitions hit a brick wall. In technological years, wireless broadband is reaching its middle age, and suffering the pangs of its first mid-life crisis.
For example, used as a small niche technology and service, it works, and works wonderfully. But as it reaches a larger mass audience, you arrive at some insurmountable issues. Technically, it is up to spec. Operationally, it is cumbersome. Connectivity and interface issues crop up constantly. Standards of quality will vary from hotspot to hotspot, from equipment to equipment. As a subscriber of wireless broadband, with so many hotspot providers in the market, you’re stymied by too much choice for too limited coverage. Besides, how do you know where you can log on wirelessly without trolling through lists and lists of locations provided by a multitude of service providers?
As a business, that’s an even greater challenge. Wireless broadband has a real-estate problem and an expensive one at that. While in no way as costly to roll out as in the cellular industry, businesses need a wide-enough coverage to convince customers that it’s a viable service to subscribe to. But how wide is wide enough? No one knows. Coupled with the fact that wireless broadband as a service is an untested business case, and location owners tend to be wary of strange signals pounding down on top of their own customers, you can see trouble coming a mile away.
There are several ways to survive a midlife crisis. You could quit your job, move to another continent, and perhaps get a flashy car to go with your new wardrobe. In wireless broadband terms, that amounts to getting noticed by the big media and major data analyst houses, each shouting in shriller and shriller terms that wireless broadband is ‘incredibly pervasive’, will be a ‘huge money generator’ and ‘incredibly disruptive to the mobile industry’. In many cases, claims like these are exaggerations or clearly unrelated and unrealistic. In all cases, it just makes cheapens a great technical innovation.
The rational alternative solution is to form an Alliance where collectively the wireless broadband industry – as a technology and a service – could drive the adoption of wireless broadband in a consistent manner. That was the chief goal of the Wireless Broadband Alliance when it was created in March 2003.
From the start, members in the Alliance would need to develop a common commercial, technical and marketing framework for wireless network interoperability. Its ultimate aim is to develop a global alliance of wireless providers that can truly deliver services that users can trust. Foremost on its agenda is the drafting of a set series of guidelines to ensure that there is good customer experience and reliability for all wireless broadband users worldwide. Lofty goals, all.
And in its short two-year history, some achievements have been made. Collectively, the Wireless Broadband Alliance operates close to 40,000 hotspots across 23 markets around the world. The Alliance itself consists of over 20 operators, representing some 228 million mobile users and 19 million broadband users. The Alliance has also been interfacing with a large group of manufacturing vendors – from PC makers like IBM to mobile players like Nokia to ensure that, if new developments in the technology do occur, these would not be created in a vacuum but with real inputs from serious operators that want to make wireless broadband work successfully.
The critical component – inter-operator wireless broadband roaming – has started to bear fruit. Billing across operators for roaming has been put in place. A consistent brand and marketing engine is slowly being rolled out, and a consistent user interface – that does not overlook the fact that language remains a key component in roaming – to ensure easier logins for wireless accounts have been created. What was once a fragmented market, has congealed into a very solid collaboration between like-minded companies – from the US to the UK, from Europe to Asia to Australia.
Wireless broadband is not out of its midlife crisis yet, though. There still remain many challenges to be faced. Location owners need to be convinced that having wireless broadband on their premises would yield significant benefits to their customers. Standards continue to evolve, so must the adoption of these standards. And what will the result be when both the mobile and wireless broadband spheres collide? With a third-generation-WiFi mobile phone possibly coming out this year, all eyes will be on the eventual wedding.
Wireless broadband is growing up. More and more business travellers are finding that its use as an access medium has immeasurably added flexibility and convenience to their daily work. And it’s clearly an important growth area for many operators. Whatever is the future of wireless broadband, it is on the cusp of outliving the allocated lifespan of any new technology. For many, that is already a great enough achievement.
For more information on the Wireless Broadband Alliance, visit www.wballiance.com.
