Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Testing the Wireless Waters With WiFi

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 01:16:34 -0500

washingtonpost.com

Testing the Wireless Waters With WiFi
Firm Sees Coasts As Internet Frontiers

By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page E01

The typical domains of wireless networks are college campuses, major airports, high-end
hotels, trendy coffee shops and
tech-heavy neighborhoods. But Forrest C. "Woody" Wheat sees a new horizon for this
increasingly popular technology: the
near-shore waters of the American coast.

Wheat, whose Reston-based firm has been selling high-speed wireless service for three
months after a year of building a
network, said he hopes to expand it for boaters using "every little estuary" along the
U.S. coast. Wheat sees maritime service as
his way to carve a niche in the market for the technology known as WiFi, a system that
makes high-speed Internet connections
from a laptop as portable as a call from a cell phone. He is among an expanding fleet of
competitors looking to capitalize on the
technology.

Those who sell WiFi service still face technical and financial challenges, and few firms
have managed to profit from selling the
service. But analysts and market watchers expect consumers to embrace the technology in
greater numbers, even as the rest of
the telecommunications industry struggles to stay afloat.

A few companies like Wheat's offer commercial WiFi service in the Washington region, and
major telecommunications
companies, such as T-Mobile and Sprint PCS Group, have invested in companies that are
beginning to market similar services.
AT&T Corp., IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. formed Cometa Networks Inc. just over a month ago to
sell WiFi service on a
national scale.

Cometa plans to build networks in the 50 largest U.S. cities this year and to blanket
metropolitan areas -- including Washington
and its suburbs -- with wireless nodes so they will be easy to find. It hopes to sell its
service to major national hotel and
restaurant chains

Wheat Wireless Services, through its TeleSea division, offers a $500 monthly plan aimed at
cruise ships and yachts whose
crews and passengers will be able to surf the Web, make appointments, or get up-to-the
minute information on weather, wind
current and water depth, said Wheat, president and chief executive of the private firm,
which he owns with his wife, Linda.

Wheat said TeleSea's signals -- unlike most others, which are limited to a range of
several hundred feet -- can reach as far as
30 miles from the coast because of the design of its radio towers. So far, Wheat has
invested less than $5 million to cover the
coast from Baltimore to the Florida Keys, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, Long Island
Sound, Southern California and
Hawaii.

"Our goal is to connect the entire coastal U.S." piece by piece, Wheat said.

Until now, the people embracing WiFi have been a relatively small number of technophiles.
Most people are unfamiliar with
how to use the technology, and coverage is still spotty.

The number of WiFi cards or access points manufactured in the United States grew from
about 3 million units in 2000 to about
10 million in 2002, according to the Yankee Group. In the next five years, the market
could grow 30 percent a year, said Sarah
Kim, an analyst with the market research firm.

WiFi, known technically as 802.11b, has populist appeal because it is simple and cheap. It
requires only that a user plug an
$80 card into a laptop and stay within range of a device sending a signal. Because the
wireless signal travels on a licensed
airwave spectrum -- the same segment of airwaves that cordless phones and garage-door
openers use -- it doesn't require
regulatory approval.

The technology has skeptics.

The Defense Department says expanded use of WiFi could interfere with military radar
systems. It has proposed limiting its use
in certain ranges of airwaves so there will be no risk of it interfering with its radar.
With the increasing popularity of wireless
devices, some companies are proposing to use additional radio frequencies to transmit
signals, but that could hurt homeland
security interests, said Steven Price, deputy assistant secretary of defense. Last month,
the Defense Department requested that
an international body limit WiFi's use in the 5-gigahertz range; the proposal will be
considered by the World
Radiocommunication Conference in June, he said.

"We have no doubt that wireless Internet and wireless broadband has a military as well as
commercial benefit," Price said. "We
met with Microsoft and Intel and many other companies involved in the wireless Internet,
and the question is whether we can
find a solution that doesn't degrade military capabilities."

Most of the WiFi market is controlled by upstarts such as Wheat's and Oneder LLC, a
Baltimore firm that plans to start
offering service in Silver Spring early this year. The larger players include T-Mobile,
which bought MobileStar Network Corp.
out of bankruptcy in 2001; Wayport Inc.; and Boingo Wireless Inc., owned in part by Sprint
PCS.

Since Wheat Wireless began service in September, it has signed two casino cruise line
customers, which plan to use their
wireless connections to verify gamblers' credit, receive safety alerts, and provide e-mail
and Internet services to guests.

"I'm a little tech-crazy. I'm connected. Everything I do is connected," said Wheat, who
spent two decades setting up
communications systems for the Navy and an additional 17 years running a company that
established military communications
systems under subcontract to AT&T. Wheat said he gets frustrated when he can't find a
connection from his network when he's
sitting in his SUV parked at a dock. He said he is banking that others like him will be
willing to pay for the advantage of having
connectivity anywhere, and that Cometa Networks won't edge him out of the market.

"We have engineered it before all the big hitters, although those guys have all the money
in the world to get it done," he said.
"They wouldn't be here if there wasn't money to be made. We've gotten here early."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3549-2003Jan2?language=printer

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