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News
Issue #2001 - 31
(August 2001)
(Updated
August 1, 2001)
MARKET
OUTLOOK & TRENDS
Private Wireless LANs Essential to the Delivery of 3G Services,
study says
Public wireless
LANs will be essential to the delivery of 3G services, but only
those operators who can overcome the obstacles along the way will
succeed, according to a report released by Datacomm Research Company
of Chesterfield, Missouri.
"Our research indicates the public wireless LANs are the
superior solution for providing next-generation wireless services to
indoor and campus hotspots," such as airports, convention
centers, and hotels, said Peter Rysavy, principal author of the
report.
Commenting on the advantages of public wireless LANs, he added
that the networks "can handle large volumes of data at
significantly lower costs, offer a migration path to speeds of 100
megabytes per second and higher, and deliver additional capacity
with pinpoint accuracy compared to leading 3G technologies."
Since public wireless networks serve the most demanding users in
the most demanding locations, 3G wireless network operators will
have to face challenges such as funding, coverage, and roaming in
order to be successful, said Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm
Research.
Conclusions found in ‘Public Wireless LANs: Challenges,
Opportunities and Strategies’
- Public WLANs complement private deployments in businesses,
government, schools, and homes.
- Public WLANs operators must join forces with the 3G mobile
phone carriers to achieve necessary coverage and service
bundling. Likewise, 3G mobile phone operators will need public
WLANs to offload heavy indoor traffic from their lower speed,
wide area networks.
- Public wireless LANs required subscription control roaming
agreements, and centralized network management, unlike their
private WLANs counterparts.
- Public wireless LAN operators will benefit from the m-commerce
opportunities, particularly those offering location-based,
targeted promotions.
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth offer complementary access services, but
Wi-Fi is significantly more mature. Bluetooth can provide access
in secondary locations, integrated with pay phones,
point-of-sale terminals, and ATMs. IEEE 802.11a offers a
migration path to speeds of 54 megabytes and higher
- Public WLANs could play a major role in the distribution of
multimedia content, which would be ideal for business and
entertainment services catering to air travelers.
Datacomm Research’s report offers sections prioritizing the
opportunities for public wireless LANs; analyzing the major
technology options (including IEEE 802.11b, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11a,
HiperLAN 2); describing the major technical challenges; and
profiling more than 30 operators, manufacturers, and third-party
service providers.
For more information: http://www.datacommresearch.com
Mobileinfo Comments and Advisory: We
agree with the findings of Datacomm Research's report. Public wireless
LANs in hot spots like airports, hotels, Starbucks coffee shops and
other meeting places is a very good start. Fundamentally, we believe
that power of concentration and attention span is far greater in hot
spots than when you are mobile. Most professionals will be willing to
accept lower speed mobile connectivity available with 3G so long as
they can get higher speed at lower costs in hot spots by utilizing
multi-band modems. However, ability to install these services in all
the hot spots is beyond the investment power of avant-garde companies
like MobileStar and Starbucks. Does this mean that wireless operators
will accept the inevitable superiority of this hybrid approach and
acquire these hot spots even though it means that in the short run,
their 3G dreams get redirected or refocused? While all the pieces of
this puzzle have not been solved and component technologies not
developed, we think Peter Rysavy has hit the nail on the head in
starting this debate. MobileInfo.Com intends to push this into open
discussion.
Note: This news release may contain
forward-looking statements. Readers should take appropriate caution in
developing plans utilizing these products, services and technology
architectures. All trademarks used in this summary are
the property of their respective owners.
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