SAN MATEO, Calif. — Small companies and noncommercial communities of developers are planting the seeds to stretch 802.11b wireless LANs into last-mile links. Although it's too early to tell what fruit their efforts will bear, some see great potential in a new kind of wireless local loop. But others see technical and business challenges that could nip the nascent market in the bud.
As many as 1 million outdoor 802.11b sites have been installed for such uses as public Internet access, a rapidly growing niche market that's spreading 802.11b adoption, said Doug Karl, chief technology officer and founder of Karlnet Inc. (Dublin, Ohio), a company that designed the Apple Airport, Lucent Orinoco and other access point devices as well as variants geared for outdoor use.
Karl and others maintain that the lack of easy-to-configure low-cost systems for end users and robust infrastructure gear for service suppliers could stall the ramp-up of a public WLAN market that Karl said has been "doubling or better every year for the past three years."
Carriers could squash the startup WLANs by asking the courts to prohibit users from sharing an Internet connection meant for only one person. So, some local communities setting up wireless networks downplay the potential of shared Web access, opening the door for a new class of wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) to lead that charge.
One looming technical hurdle is the half-duplex nature of 802.11b. If multiple users try to communicate simultaneously with a basestation, their transmissions will collide, losing data.
"The success of these systems is their downfall because the more loading you put on them, the efficiency quickly goes down to zero," said Karl, who sells a direct-sequence version of 802.11b called TurboCell with unique polling algorithms to avoid such collisions. The product, which has become popular with WISPs, also provides packet framing to optimize throughput as well as encryption to prevent unauthorized access.
Karlnet plans to release a version of TurboCell for 5.8-GHz 802.11a radios this fall. It is also working with an undisclosed antenna maker to build weather-hardened 802.11b receiver electronics into an antenna to create an all-in-one device that could sell for $300 or less.
Small ad hoc communities of developers are trying to go even further, crafting 802.11b systems that novice users could set up at home to readily link nearby WLANs into emerging neighborhood networks. Their goal: Let individual users circumvent service providers by building up a wide-area wireless network that could host local content or provide shared access to the Web.
Linux literacy
Matt Westervelt started such an effort in July 2000 when he put up his own WLAN, called Seattle Wireless, and started spreading the idea among friends. Today about 50 people attend monthly meetings for the group, which has six interconnected sites and a mailing list of 400 people.
"It's moving kind of slow," Westervelt said. "Our biggest problem is helping people get started. We have to get them to be a little literate in Linux, routing and 802.11b. It's just configuration, mostly."
To speed the process, Westervelt and a handful of others are creating a kit based on an Apple Airport card running Linux on its 80486 controller. The card is being programmed to handle a peer-to-peer mode to support multiple interfaces to other WLANs. Westervelt figures it will take several full days of hammering out software matters to finish the kit, but the work has been sidetracked lately by his day job as a systems administrator and by the fact that he recently moved.
Westervelt imagines a wireless local loop where people host content about local concerns, including streaming media from Seattle events and "stuff no one has thought of yet." Because the network is set up and maintained by individuals, it would not be subject to the crippling debt loads that weigh down today's troubled carriers, he added.
In San Francisco, software developer Tim Pozar started a similar effort with the Bay Area Wireless User Group. His goal is to construct 20 to 30 mountaintop 802.11b towers about 16 miles apart as a wide-area infrastructure covering the area from San Francisco east to Oakland and south to San Jose. Local groups could create their own neighborhood meshes by plugging into that regional net.
To enable interconnection of the local nets, Pozar and some friends are developing an open mesh protocol for 802.11b. The protocol would let each network dynamically maintain a table of other radios it can talk to and route communications on the fly.
"Right now there's a lot of engineering we have to go through," said Pozar. "There are a lot of people [working on 802.11b] but not a lot of expertise in mesh networking. We haven't gotten to the point where you can buy an access point off-the-shelf that handles mesh networking."
Pozar also hopes to publish within a month his "blueprint" for a standard 802.11b tower with a $2,000 price tag, which he is basing on the net4501 computer board from Soekris Engineering (Morgan Hill, Calif.). Net4501 uses an X86 processor, runs FreeBSD and employs standard wired routing protocols such as OSPF and Standing Tree.
Motivated by a mix of hacker curiosity and altruistic aims, Pozar's goal is to stretch the limits of 802.11b as a wireless local loop. "We want to see how far we can push a public, unlicensed wireless radio. Can we get a 20-mile hop while staying in the legal limits?" Pozar asked. "A lot of third-world countries are very interested in this," because it is about one-tenth the cost of traditional wireless links, he added.
The Bay Area group is about to incorporate into a nonprofit agency and hopes to seek grants to pursue its work. "Right now it's coming out of our own back pockets and no one can work on it full-time," Pozar said.
For a look at the commercial side of the trend to public 802.11b networks, one need stray no farther than a few miles south of San Jose, to the bedroom community of Gilroy. There, an EE and his two sons are setting up an 802.11b network to bring high-speed Net access to residential users.
Over dinner one night in January, a friend of the family showed Peter Polson a trade journal article about someone who started a company to do just that in the Midwest. "I said we could do it too," said Polson, a former consultant and researcher on the health effects of RF radiation and now CTO of the self-funded startup Bandwidth Internet in Morgan Hill.
"This being Silicon Valley, we need it. There are people here living in million-dollar homes and stuck on dial-up networks," Polson said.
When Ed Gibbs, a security specialist at Nokia Corp. who lives in Gilroy, saw a flier for the new venture he jumped at the opportunity to make his home one of its first host sites. "Ed has ID'ed a dozen people within a stone's throw of his house who are techies working at HP, IBM and Nokia and looking for high-speed Net access," said Benjamin Polson, Peter's son and chief executive of Bandwave.
Bandwave's plan is to spend about $60,000 putting up six access points over the next few weeks, potentially serving 600 homes across 42 square miles. With an upgrade using "sectorized" antennas, the net could serve up to 2,400 homes, Ben Polson said.
"The business could sustain itself with 100 subscribers. And we think in the first 24 months the network could comfortably handle a couple of thousand subscribers from the Morgan Hill to Hollister area," Polson said. "If we get to that point we've already identified five locations around the U.S. where we could deploy this."
Where's the business model?
"Almost every day I run into someone setting up a new business like this, but the business model is not clearly established yet," said Craig Mathias, a wireless consultant based in Ashland, Mass. "I personally believe that 802.11b public networks will be very successful, but we may have to go through a shakeout."
Indeed, even in relatively tiny Gilroy it turns out not one but two commercial 802.11b networks are being deployed for Internet access. South Valley ISP (San Martin, Calif.) plans to have five access points up by this fall offering speeds from 1.5 Mbits/second to 500 kbits/s, according to Bob Brentnall, who co-founded the company.
Like Bandwave, South Valley will use 802.11b technology from Karlnet that has been recommended by the regional California ISP Association. "It's been designed, we've tested it and the hardware is being deployed," said Brentnall of his wireless net.
The rise of such public 802.11b networks is just a small and somewhat troubled fraction of an overall boom in wireless LANs, said Bill Clark, research director for mobile applications at Gartner Inc. (Stamford Conn.). "There will be certain areas where it makes sense, but RF engineering is not as easy as it might seem."
Gartner's Dataquest arm estimates that about 6.9 million 802.11b adapter cards shipped in 2001. It projects about a 50 percent annual growth rate out to 2004, when as many as 30 million cards could ship. About 70 percent of those networks are traditional indoor WLANs going into businesses, but another slice, one that is growing, is filled by public hot spots, isolated individual nodes in a cafe or other locale where computer users are likely to congregate.
Dataquest estimates that there were 1,000 such hot spots in the United States in January, and it expects the number to mushroom to 3,300 by the end of this year.
"What's really needed in the public hot spot is a standard experience for users. There are a couple of thousand hot spots in the U.S., but no one knows where they are at," Clark said.
Pass-One, a consortium of 802.11b vendors and service providers, is trying to address that situation. The group held its first meeting on June 20 with 20 WISPs and 30 vendors attending. Their goal is to agree on a standard service level, roaming plan and logo for hot spots by the end of the year.
National net?
Last month, The New York Times reported that AT&T, IBM and Intel are working on a separate plan called Project Rainbow to set up a national 802.11b network. Companies involved in the project have declined to comment.
The Personal Telco Project, a group dedicated to enabling public 802.11b networks, maintains a list of Web sites for more than 200 public 802.11b projects in more than 25 countries. In July, market watcher In-Stat posted a report that in South Korea alone, KT Telecom plans to have 25,000 hot spots deployed by the end of 2002. The carrier hopes that as many as 2 million of its DSL customers could be using the wireless hot spots by the end of 2003, according to In-Stat.
