Subject: [NEXTEL-1] UNWIRED - A Wired Special Report - May 2003

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 03:08:24 -0400

Congrats-AT

Anthony Townsend and Terry Schmidt -- the piratesThe most famous Wi-Fi node in the world,
in midtown Manhattan's Bryant Park, went live last June, switched on by Anthony Townsend,
who
teaches urban planning at NYU, and his free-wireless comrade, Terry Schmidt. By the end of
the
summer, the network was drawing 50-plus users a day and had transformed the duo's
organization, NYCwireless, from a bunch of bandwidth pirates into a respected champion of
public
access. Their pitch: Any neighborhood can go wireless, for as little as $1,000. "Bryant
Park
spends almost as much on rat poison every year," says Schmidt. The two are now at work on
a
new, eight-node "walking network" that will put every part of downtown within a
five-minute walk
of free Wi-Fi. - Lucas Graves
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wi-Fi Revolution

The wireless Internet has arrived -- and now the sky's the limit.

By Chris Anderson

We stand at the brink of a transformation. It is a moment that echoes the birth of the
Internet in the mid-'70s,
when the radical pioneers of computer networking - machines talking to each other! -
hijacked the telephone
system with their first digital hellos. Or that jaw-dropper a decade later when the FCC
official whose job it was to
track the growth of communications networks suddenly realized that his neat tabulation of
local and long-distance
had been made moot by the unforeseen rise of local-area networks: an unregulated,
unmonitored, uncontrollable
phenomenon of the upstart PC industry that would soon shake the telecom world. Or the
arrival of the Web
browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.

This time it is not wires but the air between them that is being transformed. Over
the past three years, a wireless technology has arrived with the power to totally
change the game. It's a way to give the Internet wing without licenses,
permission, or even fees. In a world where we've been conditioned to wait for cell
phone carriers to bring us the future, this anarchy of the airwaves is as liberating
as the first PCs - a street-level uprising with the power to change everything.

The technology is Wi-Fi, and it's the first blast in a revolution, called open
spectrum, that will drive the Internet to the next stage in its colonization of the
globe. Like the Net itself, Wi-Fi was confined to technical circles for years before
exploding into the mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the past two
years, it's become one of the fastest-growing electronics technologies in history.

What makes the new standard so alluring? Wi-Fi is cheap, powerful, and, most
important, it works. A box the size of a paperback, and costing no more than
dinner for two, magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the size of a
football field. A card no larger than a matchbook receives it. The next laptop you
buy will probably have Wi-Fi built in. Wires may soon be for power alone.

But the appeal goes deeper. Wi-Fi represents a fundamentally different approach to the
airwaves that could lead
to a new era of wireless policy. Like other open spectrum technologies rising in its wake,
Wi-Fi is a way to use the
handful of frequencies set aside for unrestricted consumer use. That's true of the old CB
radio, too, but unlike the
trucker channels Wi-Fi is digital and smart enough to avoid congestion. After 100 years of
regulations that
assumed serious wireless technologies were fragile and in need of protection by monopolies
on exclusive
frequencies (making spectrum the most valuable commodity of the information age), Wi-Fi is
fully capable of
protecting itself. It has turned the airwaves into a commons without tragedy, and turned
the economics of
wireless on its head.

Among the geeks, Wi-Fi has become a fascination, a glimpse of the future of the Internet.
Like the Web, it's open,
unregulated, and free. It doesn't require a loyalty oath to some corporate behemoth.
Anyone can deploy it, and
millions have. For many it's an epiphany - the unforgettable impact of being in the
presence of something
important and new.

No one has been more startled by all of this than the big cellular companies, which paid
dearly for transmission
rights just a few years ago. Flush with the success of digital phones, they expected the
next big thing to emerge
the same way. US firms were focused on catching up with their European rivals, who in turn
were obsessed with
the prospect of ruling the next great technology era (take that, Silicon Valley!) with
so-called 3G networks, which
would offer multimedia on a new generation of do-everything smartphones. But the 3G dream
was already in
trouble. The technology wasn't working well, and amid the telecom bust, the $100 billion
European carriers
borrowed for spectrum licenses was starting to seem like a colossal mistake.

Then came a bolt out of the ether: Consumers realized there was a way to get wireless
Internet that didn't
require phone companies at all. Wi-Fi had arrived, and it did what it promised right out
of the box. Cheap Wi-Fi
packages started showing up on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, and they sold in
remarkable numbers: 12
million units last year, and on pace to double that this year.

What's extraordinary about this boom is that it's an authentic grassroots phenomenon,
happening in the home
even faster than in the office. Companies are cautious about the security implications of
a network that goes
through walls and into the street, but most home users are too dazzled to care. Anyone
with a broadband
connection can plug a $100 access point into a cable modem or DSL box, slip a $60 card
into a laptop, and
suddenly have that most fabled of tech ambitions: Internet everywhere, or at least
everywhere around the house.
Stream video from the couch, surf in bed, email in the backyard, all at lightning speed.
How many other
technologies leave even hardened gadget vets grinning with amazement?

And that's just the beginning. We are starting to see the next phase of the Wi-Fi
movement: the rise of public
networks. Already there are thousands of open-access hot spots across the country,
everywhere from Starbucks
and airports to city parks. Others are ad hoc community nets, such as neighboring
apartment dwellers using Wi-Fi
to share a broadband connection. Tens of thousands more are accidental, leaking out of
private homes or offices
and often free for passersby to hitchhike on. With prices for Wi-Fi equipment continuing
to plummet, it's just a
matter of time before the scattering of Wi-Fi dots on city maps grow dense and then
overlap.

In the years ahead, Wi-Fi will become a universal standard, found everywhere in the
electronics world. It will show
up in consumer electronics devices, from videogame consoles to music players. Cell phones
will have it, as will
PDAs and digital cameras. Any PC bought in a year or so will instantly become the hub of a
wireless network,
simply by turning it on. The numbers will quickly reach true mass-market levels: an
estimated 99 million people
with Wi-Fi by 2006, according to Gartner.

All of this amounts to an inversion of the usual adoption cycle, where big companies must
build communications
infrastructures to encourage consumers to jump on new technologies (as was the case with
cell phones). Wi-Fi is
becoming ubiquitous for its own reasons. The question is, what networks and services will
arise to capitalize on it?
Rather than "build it and they will come," the mantra is "they're already here, now build
it!"

But build what, exactly? Here are the next four big fronts in the Wi-Fi invasion.

Making it work everywhere.Today the gap between a cell phone experience and Wi-Fi is huge.
With a phone,
it's usually safe to assume you've got a signal; with Wi-Fi it's almost always safe to
assume you don't. Even in the
presence of a hot spot (and there are few good ways to know you are, short of opening your
laptop and "sniffing"
for it), odds are you won't be able to log on, because it's either a private network or a
commercial one that
requires a subscription. Even places that advertise access, such as hotels and airports,
often have it just in the
lobby or at certain gates.

Several companies are working on key chains, cards, and pendants that will glow in the
presence of a Wi-Fi signal,
which is a start (especially if they are smart enough to identify only the networks you
can log on to). Cell phones
could do the same. But until commercial hot spots are widespread and roaming agreements
are in place between
them, public Wi-Fi will continue to be more like the Internet café experience, where you
have to seek out access,
than the cell phone experience, where it finds you. Companies such as Boingo and Cometa
are aiming to achieve
this, but it's a big world out there. Expect a few more years of frustration.

Unwiring the living room.Digital media, from MP3 to DVD, is taking over, but the equipment
in most homes is still
largely analog. Consumer electronics makers have been unable to come up with a common
digital standard to link
gear, and even if they did, few consumers want to string networking cable under their
couch.

Wi-Fi can break this logjam and become the common link that ties together music, video,
and even phones around
the house, automatically and effortlessly. Then the notion of a central entertainment
server, which records TV,
stores music and video, and plays it back on any screen in the house, will finally take
off. Once the living room is
a wirelessly networked digital media hub, the long-awaited era of Internet video may
arrive, kicking broadband
demand into high gear.

Using Wi-Fi to cross the last mile.As consumer electronics start to ship with wireless
networking built in,
demand will skyrocket for the broadband connections to make it all worthwhile. Which could
be another
opportunity for Wi-Fi. Currently, getting broadband at home is, at best, an uninspiring
choice between the phone
company and the cable company - if it's available at all.

Wi-Fi hot spots mounted on lampposts or telephone poles, with directional antennas to
extend their range and
avoid congestion, could offer as good or better service. And the economies of scale of a
truly mainstream
technology could make it far cheaper than other wireless options. Also, neighborhood Wi-Fi
"umbrellas" could
employ the miles of unused fiber-optic cable that are a legacy of the telecom bubble,
effectively bridging the
otherwise expensive "last mile" from the main telecom networks to individual homes.

Converging with the cell phone.Finally, once there's widespread Wi-Fi in the home, the
neighborhood, and
enough public spaces, wireless convergence starts to make sense. Today, it's not uncommon
to find consumers
who are fully wireless: a cell phone outside the home, cordless phones within, and a Wi-Fi
network for data. Yet,
while some of these devices share the same frequencies (cordless phones and Wi-Fi both use
the 2.4-GHz and
5-GHz bands), they are based on different standards and can't talk to each other.

Bringing them together is just a matter of time. Wi-Fi, especially in higher-speed
incarnations, is as capable of
transmitting voice as any cordless phone, and because calls travel over the Internet
rather than over a phone
network, they are far cheaper. By the same token, several companies are planning to add
Wi-Fi to cell phones,
allowing users to make calls over the Internet when in Wi-Fi range. The dream to emerge
from this is a single
device that moves seamlessly from home to road, using the best network available wherever
it is.

It's this vision of convergence that has the smarter telcos reconsidering their 3G plans
in light of the Wi-Fi boom.
There are many parts that still must come together, but it is not hard to imagine a day
when the Internet really is
everywhere, just in different strengths and price tiers depending on the cost of the
underlying infrastructure. Your
phone might be free to use at home and in the office, cheap in your neighborhood and
downtown, free again at a
café trying to boost business, and relatively expensive on the highway. Most of those
would be Wi-Fi networks,
with cell phone service as a seamless but costly fallback, like analog roaming is for
digital phones today.

Wi-Fi is just a few years old - still in its first blush of success. No doubt some of the
above will prove impractical,
and problems from security to interference will arise to slow its growth. But it has
already proven gloriously
disruptive, as all great technologies are. Will it shake the cell phone industry? We don't
yet know. But the golden
age of wireless has only just begun. Give it time.

Wi-Fi ExplainedWireless networking comes in a variety of flavors, all of them identified
by a string
of numbers and letters only a librarian could love. Beware: Not all standards are created
equal.

802.11bThe standard that started it all. Seeking to invent a speedy way to send data via
unlicensed
airwaves, engineers working on a standard for wireless local-area networks borrowed from
existing technologies -
Ethernet's data packets, the Internet's routing protocols, and spread spectrum's use of
many channels within a
frequency band. The result is information delivered at speeds up to 11 Mbps in the 2.4-GHz
band, and at a range
of about 300 feet. In 1999, an industry group wisely decided to give it a more friendly
name and settled on the
retro-chic Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity.

802.11aFinalized four years ago, 802.11a works in the 5- to 6-GHz band at speeds of up to
54 Mbps.
Products based on the standard were first introduced in late 2001. Its strengths: high
speed and lower risk of
radio frequency interference than either 802.11b or 802.11g. Its weakness: a is
incompatible with the more
popular b and the emerging g, because it strayed from the 2.4-GHz band. As a result, some
manufacturers have
quit building products for it. But as WLANs proliferate, it could prove essential to
serving large populations in
concentrated area, such as downtowns, universities, and business centers.

802.11gThe much-anticipated 802.11g has already been revised six times; approval is
expected in mid-2003.
Why all the excitement? It promises complete interoperability with b and transmission
rates up to five times faster
in the same 2.4-GHz band. Early products are already on the market from Wi-Fi heavyweights
such as Apple,
Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link. Among the challenges for g: higher vulnerability to radio
frequency interference from
other 2.4-GHz devices, such as late-generation cordless phones.

Free the Air!As big as it is, Wi-Fi is just the start of something even bigger: a set of
"open spectrum"
technologies that could rewrite the rules of the airwaves, reversing a century of
regulatory policy and enabling an
explosion of new wireless devices and services.

The notion that wireless users, like airplanes in a landing pattern, need to be fenced off
by themselves is an
anachronism, a throwback to the days of analog. Radio signals are not like physical
objects, which cannot occupy
the same space at the same time without a crunch. Electromagnetic waves pass through one
another effortlessly,
and they can be extracted from a sea of other signals, even on the same frequency bands.
The trick is knowing
what you're looking for.

Wired Illustrator
Open spectrum technologies cut through the noise rather
than requiring regulatory protection from interference. One
key technique is spread spectrum, a way to transmit over
many frequencies simultaneously; if some channels are
blocked, others will let data through. Wi-Fi spreads its signal
over 14 channels on the 2.4-GHz band.

Two technologies have made that easier. The first is spread spectrum, which is a way of
scattering a transmission
around over many narrow frequencies, shotgun-style. Even if some are drowned out by
interference, others will
still get through - noise is rarely evenly distributed. And because the receiver knows the
sequence of frequencies
that the transmissions will be coming in, it can ignore those arriving at different times.
The second is digital radio,
which can break up a transmission into Internet-like packets with addresses. DR receivers
pay attention only to
the packets meant for them, allowing many devices to use the same frequencies. Add error
correction and the
ability to resend any part of a message that is lost, and you have radios that can cut
through the noisiest
environments and share airwaves with hundreds of nearby transmitters.

On the back of the Wi-Fi phenomenon, a growing cadre of open spectrum activists are now
pushing for wholesale
changes in telecom regulation, extending the same principles to the rest of the wireless
world. How much lower
would your cell phone bill be if carriers didn't spend billions for licenses? How much
closer would you be to
broadband Internet in your pocket? The only thing that has kept the venerable landline
alive for so long is the
assumption that the airwaves were too limited to be shared by all. Once we thought the
same about the Internet
itself. - C.A.

People to WatchIntroducing the innovators, rebels, and policymakers who are leading the
wireless revolution.

Anthony Townsend and Terry Schmidt -- the piratesThe most famous Wi-Fi node in the world,
in midtown Manhattan's Bryant Park, went live last June, switched on by Anthony Townsend,
who
teaches urban planning at NYU, and his free-wireless comrade, Terry Schmidt. By the end of
the
summer, the network was drawing 50-plus users a day and had transformed the duo's
organization, NYCwireless, from a bunch of bandwidth pirates into a respected champion of
public
access. Their pitch: Any neighborhood can go wireless, for as little as $1,000. "Bryant
Park
spends almost as much on rat poison every year," says Schmidt. The two are now at work on
a
new, eight-node "walking network" that will put every part of downtown within a
five-minute walk
of free Wi-Fi. - Lucas Graves

Sky Dayton -- the surferIf it worked once, Sky Dayton figures, it could work again. So he
modeled his new Boingo Wireless on EarthLink, the Internet service provider he founded in
1994:
String together hundreds of local access providers into a seamless network, then share the

revenue. A year in, Boingo claims to have about 1,200 Wi-Fi hot spots in 300 cities
throughout 46
states. Boasts Dayton, "We're the first company to make it easy for anyone to find and
connect
to a huge network of hot spots." Nipping at his heels: Cometa Networks, a joint venture of
AT&T,
Intel, and IBM; AT&T Wireless, a partnership with wireless ISP Wayport; and fast-growing
Wi-Fi
service providers. - Mark Frauenfelder

Teresa Meng -- the professorFive years ago, Stanford electrical engineering professor
Teresa
Meng founded Atheros to produce her groundbreaking Radio-on-a-Chip - a marvel of
integration
and miniaturization that cornered the market on 802.11a wireless equipment. But as demand
rose
for the earlier standard, 802.11b, Atheros created a single, low-cost chipset that worked
with
both standards, as well as the emerging 802.11g. Now the company's improving output power
to
extend the chip's range. Meanwhile, Meng continues her prize-winning research in low-power

circuit design, wireless communication, and biosignal processing. "Five or ten years from
now, we
won't worry about communication with wires," she says. "You'll just open your laptop or
PDA and
the data will be there." - Joseph Portera

Ken Biba -- the distance runnerKen Biba helped develop TCP, the connection protocol at the

heart of the Internet. Now, as CEO of Vivato, he's again at the center of a revolution. So
far,
Wi-Fi has been confined to local networks, because its limited range means you'd need up
to
2,000 nodes to cover, say, a university campus. But Vivato's switching technology - the
first in
the industry - extends reach from roughly 30 feet to 4 miles. You'd need just 30 to 50
Vivato
switches to turn all of Dartmouth into a hot spot. And it may go further than that. "Data
can't
travel on a voice network, but voice can travel on a data network," says Biba. Watch out,
Grandma Bells. - Jessie Scanlon

Michael Powell -- the manIf you're a regulator who hates to regulate, it doesn't get any
better than Wi-Fi. To
FCC chief Michael Powell, the use of unlicensed spectrum for free-floating Internet access
is "a demonstration of
the wonderful unintended consequences of less government intrusion." Now the commission is
looking at unused
television spectrum: If there's no Channel 7 in Cincinnati, why not free up the bandwidth?
Broadcasters may balk,
but Powell thinks everyone will benefit eventually. Meanwhile, he's set up hot spots in
the FCC itself. "We're not
quite Starbucks," he quips, "but it's still pretty neat." - Frank Rose

George Allen and Barbara Boxer -- the senatorsGeorge Allen is a pro-life, pro-gun
Republican
conservative from Virginia. Democrat Barbara Boxer is a two-fisted California liberal. But
the two
senators have forged an alliance over a single issue: getting wireless broadband into
businesses
and homes. In January, Allen (whose state includes the Dulles technology corridor) and
Boxer
(who represents Silicon Valley) unveiled the Jumpstart Broadband Act of 2003, which would
force
the FCC to make unlicensed 5-GHz spectrum available. The bill got a boost in February,
when the
Department of Defense, which currently controls that range, announced an agreement with
tech
companies to relinquish some of the spectrum. - Matt Bai

Dewayne Hendricks -- the ultrawideband cowboyEntrepreneur Dewayne Hendricks helped bring
wireless broadband access to Mongolia, to Native American reservations, and most recently
to
isolated schools in Thailand. A member of the FCC's prestigious Technological Advisory
Council, he
says it's time to wrest control of the airwaves from the government. And he's looking
beyond
Wi-Fi to technologies like ultrawideband, cognitive (software-defined) radio, and
dense-packet
radio topologies that could soon make licensing unnecessary. Consider the benefits:
wireless
access for a nearly unlimited number of people, choreographed by smart software in their
devices,
not by Beltway bureaucrats. - Brent Hurtig

Doug Karl -- the apple farmerDoug Karl invented the Apple AirPort, built the first device
to
translate Ethernet input into wireless output, and wrote access point software licensed to

companies like Sony, Dell, and IBM. He is also founder and president of KarlNet, a growing
Dublin,
Ohio-based company whose flagship product is TurboCell - a supercharged protocol that can
be
"flashed" into inexpensive Wi-Fi gear, optimizing it for high-performance, long-range use
outdoors.
The improvement is especially useful in rural areas, where access points can provide
entire
communities with broadband. An answer to the last-mile problem? "It's more like the last
20 miles,"
he says. - Joseph Portera

Don Samuelson -- the builderThe information revolution mostly skipped over southwestern
Chicago, where grinding poverty makes high technology seem like a luxury. But by using
relatively
inexpensive wireless networks, real estate developer Don Samuelson plans to connect the
part of
town to the rest of the world. A former assistant director of the Illinois Housing
Development
Authority, Samuelson owns or manages more than 2,000 units of low-income housing in the
area.
With $50,000 worth of mostly donated Motorola equipment, he aims to make southwestern
Chicago broadband-accessible. His first project: an antenna atop his New Englewood Terrace

apartment building to provide broadband access over a 10-mile radius. - Alex Ulam

David Reed -- the visionaryIn David Reed's perfect world, there'd be no cell phone towers.
The
MIT Media Lab adjunct professor envisions wireless devices communicating with one another,

acting like tiny transmitters. Wireless spectrum, he says, is "the ultimate renewable
resource," and
because radio signals are made of photons that can pass through each other, it's also
"expandable and scalable without bound." Reed and fellow researcher Andy Lippman founded
the
Viral Communications project to explore how cooperating devices could one day make
cellular
carriers, cable companies, and ISPs obsolete. "We expect everything to be able to connect
to
everything else," says Reed, who also helped develop the original Internet protocols. "And
we
don't want to pay a monthly fee for each device." - Mark Frauenfelder

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