How Muni Wi-Fi Could Impact WLANs

What happens when the residential wireless-LAN market, which represents about half of overall WLAN sales, disappears? This is a growing market that is expanding to include voice and video. It's got MIMO. Products are cheap and convenient. And Wi-Fi is not going away. Ever.

In fact, the biggest trend in Wi-Fi in recent years has been a different kind of triple play-the residence, public spaces and the enterprise. But it's that public-space opportunity that threatens the residential market.

Customers install residential WLANs, after all, to distribute broadband around their houses, without the need to install new wiring or even to plug in. The wireless router connects to cable or DSL (OK, even fixed broadband wireless sometimes), and the antenna on the other side brings the Internet to the far corners of the home. But with public-access WLANs entering what will be a paradigm-shifting growth phase, why not use the public WLAN, where available, as the residential WLAN? Dump cable and DSL; put up the client Wi-Fi antenna and off you go. We could even see effective throughput far greater than is likely to be available on cable or DSL anytime soon, and at a much lower price.

This scenario is actually one incarnation of a more important trend. Note how the cell phone has redefined voice communications, moving it from a place to a person. Lots of people now use the cell as their primary or even only phone. So, what happens when mobile broadband becomes a cost-effective, pervasive reality? Will you put a cable or DSL connection in your house, or will you carry this level of connectivity with you wherever you roam? Can't such power be built into your handset (apart, of course, from battery issues)? Why not use an ultrawideband-based wireless personal-area network to interconnect all of those mobile things you carry?

Yes, of course, we could use HSDPA or 1xEV-DO as our mobile broadband vehicle, and perhaps we sometimes will.But metro-scale Wi-Fi will be a much better choice-it's cheaper, faster and has better overall capacity. Wi-Fi comes free with most new notebook computers (and who needs a desktop anymore?). Its throughput and capacity continue to accelerate, and, hey, we might even get .11n this year. Sure, it's unlicensed; interference is a possibility. So, start using .11a already, and that problem mostly goes away.

The only real problem I foresee is the poor in-building penetration that metro-scale Wi-Fi is likely to have. There's an easy solution on the horizon, though-believe it or not, the repeater. I'm expecting big innovations in repeaters this year, with almost-zero configuration and the possibility of centralized management in public-access applications, if for nothing more than optimal channel assignments in metro-scale environments. That way, the interference problem is further addressed, if not minimized, at least for Wi-Fi traffic in the unlicensed bands. What could be simpler? And, of course, repeaters will also be used to solve the far-corner-of-the-house-problem. Follow all of this to its logical conclusion, and there won't be too many consumers trekking to the store for new wire-less routers.

The more things change, the more they remain the same? Not in wireless. Wireless in 2006 begins with a level of innovation that most other sectors of high technology can only dream about.

Craig Mathias ([email protected]), principal at Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.)