Enterprise Wireless

Time to look at Draft N

2006-11-09T00:06:00.000-08:00

Time for a re-think (another one). I'd say now is just about the right time to start looking at Draft- N Wi-Fi.

Unless, of course, you're planning to fill an office with Wi-Fi, in which case your suppliers are very sensibly holding off for a bit longer.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced it will be branding Draft N. The top four laptop makers are putting it in their machines. Intel's bringing its own chips out next year, and adding it to Centrino.

It won't be in enterprise kit for a bit longer - though I wonder if Cisco is going to be looking closely at the business its Linksys susbsidiary is doing with Draft N products.

Most people still don't need it of course - especislly in the home where it's getting used most. If your uplink is less then 8 Mbit/s and you're getting that sort of throughput to all your PCs already, it's only going to show any benefits on file transfers inside your LAN.

I've got WiMax!

2006-11-02T14:40:00.000-08:00

Today, my WiMax connection arrived: I now have a 4Mbit/s duplex wireless broadband link, uncontended, beamed 6.5km from central London. The people at Urban WiMax offered a free trial earlier this year (it's commercial contracts only now) and liked the idea of having a journalist on their books. There's more about them in the FT (subscription required).

Urban WiMax has been offering 4 to 10 Mbit/s full duplex, using WiMax links in the light-licensed 5.8GHz spectrum or in 4.9 GHz under a trial arrangement.

Mine's in 4.9GHz, using an Airspan CPE antenna and a security gateway box from Billion (not heard of them before).

The sales director at Urban Wimax, Colin Flynn, says they now have meshed base stations on several London hotels, and paying customers including churches and content providers.

I love the name "Urban Wimax". Wasn't this originally a technology for rural areas, where the wires wouldn't reach? Surely there's so much fibre and cable in town we don't need it here? Nope, says Flynn. One of his London customers came to him because they couldn't get DSL despite being only a kilometre from the exchange. The cable run was effectively more like seven km.

I would have expected users to hesitate over the reliability of wireless links, but Flynn says they don't - largely because the competition is useless: "We're in an environment where people expect poor service from the wired providers." At a consumer level, he's certainly right: I've had issues with my provider. It's working OK now, but I don't know anyone who really trusts their provider.

Some of the customers take WiMax as a back-up, and then switch over to use it as their main link, he says.

He's also not worried about competition from Pipex. The presence of a big, well-known brand, has kick-started a lot of interest, he says.

The installation was painless: a half-hour signal test on Monday, and a two-hour visit today, during which time Marcel and James from Urban Wimax screwed an antenna on a bracket to my house, and ran a cable inside.

I'm a bit outside their normal catchment area (as well as their normal business demographic). They found the signal easily though, pointing the antenna through a gap between the neighbours' roofs.
I'll take better pictures, but in this one, you can see the clump of buildings it's aimed at.

My antenna is pointed at the pale building indicated by a tiny red arrow.

You can also just see the Post Office Tower you can see next to the chimney. Ready for BT to make its big WiMax play someday?

Who wants a Wi-Fi Phone? Actually, I do!

2006-11-02T04:07:00.000-08:00

Can I change my mind? Contraary to my last post, I think the issues with Wi-Fi handsets are well on the way to being solved.

What's happened to me? I've been using a Nokia E61. Now, I'd heard about the E-series, but remained sceptical. Having used it I found in practice it gives very good battery life in either Wi-Fi or cellular mode (leave them both on and the battery drains noticeably quicker than an ordinary phone). And the voip options for it, like Truphone, are actually useful.

Apart from anything else, the phone -- the first Nokia I've got to know properly for some time -- is well designed and does what it should do.

Wi-Fi weakness sends Adobe camping

2006-10-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed a visit to Adobe's travelling Acrobat roadshow the other week. The company's trining 5000 people in the new Acrobat, over the next few months - in a tent.

There's a small presentation theatre, and another room with a Stratus fault-tolerant server, and thirty laptops, each equipped with a scanner and video camera, for people to try the software.

Why in a tent? It's the only way to get a predictable environment where they know it's going to work. In the tent each laptop has a Gig. in a hotel meeting room, they'd be relying on Wi-Fi. And we all know that wouldn't be good enough.

Who wants Wi-Fi in a phone?

2006-09-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Is it possible that we don't actually care about Wi-Fi in phones? There's still not many out there, and I'm wondering if there's much demand either.

There've been a couple of major-ish launches in the last two weeks - well, actually, two launches of well-known products (the Blackberry and the Treo) re-jigged to fit particular niches.

We can enjoy the irony that the Palm Treo looks more and more like a Blackberry while the Blackberry Pearl is trying to look like a feature phone. But that's superficial, as they each have their own user interface (or in Palm's case, Microsoft's user interface) and their own fans.

What's interesting is that both had features added to meet market needs, but neither of them has Wi-Fi. And at the press conferences, when asked why not, the marketing people of both companies made it quite clear that they thought about it and rejected it out of hand as a dumb idea.

If your handset's battery has just been drained by Wi-Fi, it's no good as a phone, said Palm's Ed Colligan. RIM's Charmaine Eggberry laughed at the idea they'd use space in their smallest Blackberry to add a battery-eating technology.

This kind of thing must be a bit dismal for the people (mostly software makers for converged services) who've been telling me all year that phones are all going to have Wi-Fi, and converged services will drop out of the sky.

Well they might do that. But not just yet.

What about the demand for them? I don't know in great detail, but I have noticed changes in what this country's metropolitan Wi-Fi people have been saying. Metro Wi-Fi was first pitched as a great way for local government employees to keep in touch with their office systems on the move, using Wi-Fi bandwidth, which would be free once the network was rolled out.

All the local government people I've spoken to lately say they aren't doing that. Their staff are on GPRS or 3G data, because it's got better coverage, the network and handsets are provided and maintained by a third party, and the batteries last longer.

(there have been other changes too in the metro pitch, such as the idea that it would provide connectivity to the disadvantaged, and heal the digital divide, but we'll go into that later).

For now - who really needs dual-mode Wi-Fi handsets?

BlackBerry Pearl and the size obsession

2006-09-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

RIM repeated two mantras at the BlackBerry event yesterday. One was about size (the other was about choice - we'll come to that later). You can't be too slim, is basically what they said - and I'm coming to see they may be right.

RIM has good, single-minded engineers, who work well to an over-riding single task. In earlier Blackberrys this goal was: do email. Throw out everything else that doesn't do email, and might waste power, screen or device space.

This time round RIM had a slightly more complext overall goal - appeal to consumers - but RIM boiled it down to a single-minded task for its engineers: be SMALL. Have a camera and storage and a media player and all that, and be a BlackBerry, but be small.

Now, my conscious reaction is to sneer. Oh really, are people so fickle that they will pick a device purely on the basis of its size? Surely functions matter more!

I've written stories based on this opinion. Last week, I wrote on ZDNet about how users are too dumb to pick up smartphones, because they "can't tell the difference" between a data-oriented device and a phone with a camera.

Now, I think my take was completely wrong, and I base this result on unbiased user research.

On Monday, my phone died and I needed a new one from T-Mobile. I rang up and asked what I could have on my current plan (or, actually, on the new Flext plan which sounds like a boon for people like me who don't want to understand plans).

I ruled out the expensive options, and found myself offered a Nokia E70, Symbian smartphone. I know people who are happy with this, and it's widely seen as "the Symbian phone you wind up using". I checked the size, the weight, and the talk time, and rejected it.

Instead, I picked up the next in a series of Sony Ericssons, the W810.

I am someone who CAN tell the difference between a smartphone and a feature phone, and I still went for the feature phone. In terms of my news story last week, I am a dumb consumer. So much so, that I now have a phone with a Walkman brand on it. Can I erase it?

But, here's the point. Just as RIM predicted, I chose on the basis of size. How puerile!

My Sony Ericsson Pearl is sitting on my desk now, next to my BlackBerry Pearl. And I'm ashamed to say, it's the first smartphone I've seen that I can imagine owning.

Aruba going for IPO?

2006-08-31T05:21:00.000-07:00

Aruba is planning an IPO, according to Unstrung, who are the kind of people who would know. Wireless LAN users will be interested because the company will have to publish
results (WLAN vendors have so far been pretty secretive), and also because it will come under the control of shareholders. We'll have to wait and see whether they are "ignorant", as Unstrung suggests.

I'd pretty much given up on any of the companies in this space actually going public. They're all founded on the premise of explosive growth, with the old model that they'll do an IPO and get loads of money that way, if they can't persuade Cisco or Nortel or one of the other big players to buy them first. That model hasn't worked this century (except for Airespace), largely because there's only really one company ( Cisco ) left that's ready and able to pay the sort of money the VCs would expect for these start-ups..

I've been thinking that enterprise WLANs is turning out to be the kind of slow-growing area where IPOs and big buy-outs just don't happen.

Aruba's new CEO, Dominic Orr, who I last met in June doesn't agree. Perhaps he's thinking of the kind of froth we've seen around Web 2.0, and VoIP players like Skype and Vonage (though Vonage's IPO was apparently a flop).

Internet voice hits a time warp...

2006-08-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

I just made a bid to catch up with the rest of the world, and found myself travelling back in time. I made a VoIP call from a public hotspot - And found myself using an old-fashioned red telephone box, and a phone that resembles my old 1990s Nokia, in a manner resembling the 1980s Rabbit network, where customers could make phone calls hanging around on street corners.

I've got a Vonage Wi-Fi phone on test, which can make calls from my home Wi-Fi, or any other hotspot that doesn't require a web browser and password. The Cloud has a deal to let Vonage calls through without any registration, so I can use this phone - at least in theory - at any Cloud hotspot.

I'm at the Techworld office in Gray's Inn Road, so I search for local hotspots, and try The Puzzle pub first. No joy there - there's Wi-Fi, but it claims to be BT OpenZone. So I head for a BT payphone in Bedford Way, where the Cloud also promises service.

Sure enough, there's not just a payphone, but an old fashioned callbox. My phone detects an access point, and I make a call.

I'm still unsure though. There's no visual evidence that this phone box is actually providing the Wi-Fi (it's metal - shouldn't there be an antenna on the outside?). And, though the phone did detect a Cloud hotspot, it's hard to tell whether it connected to that or another one...

802.11n rumours

2006-08-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

I'm hearing rumours that there may be some kind of 802.11n progress in the next day or so. Nothing definite, but I've heard it's progress, rather than another "delay" (which is how most routine steps in the IEEE voting procedure tend to get mis-reported).

Meanwhle, what else is going on? The accepted wisdom is that MIMO is only for consumers right now, till the 802.11n standard is complete. That's certainly born out by Atheros' approach: the company is cutting the number of radios to make MIMO cheaper, so it's draft-n products will be even more attractive to consumers at Christmas. This confirms what everyone's saying - and what I (and everyone else) found in reviews of draft-n kit.

Despite all this, there is one company out there selling MIMO products aimed at the enterprise. Blusocket launched a MIMO access point earlier this year. We haven't yet reviewed it, and Bluesocket's market tends to be a bit niche-y, but they're getting some good coverage from one customer, Smart City Networks, that does the wireless networks for a bunch of US convention centres (or should that be centers?).

Unstrung reports that Smart City is using the Bluesocket MIMO kit for convention centres in Las Vegas and elsewhere - along with some background about how demanding that sort of environment is, indicating what a good test it will be of the MIMO performance.

It brings back the atmosphere of a few years ago, when Wi-Fi itself was emerging. Show nets were a good way to promote Wi-Fi, in an environment where there might be some users ready and willing to try it out. These networks were usually subsidised by the vendors, and often failed.

Now, show Wi-Fi is promoring the new-wave of Wi-Fi. Connection is more of an essential item now, so there's less of shopfront aspect, though I expect there's an element of subsidy here.

The picture of CES at Vegas is from Paul Thurtt's WinSupersite.

HP shows its wireless stuff...

2006-08-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

HP stumped up a 5300 switch and a wireless LAN module for Techworld to review. There's no big surprises in the review, but Dave Cartwright takes issue with the lack of GUI integration between the wireless module and the switch - and integration is supposed to be the name of the game, at this stage of the enterprise wireless LAN market.

We hear from various people that the HP wireless module is actually from Symbol, but HP insists its theirs. The lack of integration would suggest it's been bought in. I doubt there are any clues in the screenshot, but if anyone wants to study it, I'd be interested in comments. I've checked the MAC addresses, and they're a range owned by HP.

Wi-Fi: It's not as widespread as you think...

2006-08-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've just been to Cornwall for a fortnight. I didn't feel the need to go online once.

But, for anyone who thinks Wi-Fi is everywhere now, there's good news and bad news. There's no public Wi-Fi in Mullion, the biggest village on the Lizard peninsula (the farthest south you can go in mainland Britain).
To get any Wi-Fi, you have to travel more than five miles, to Helston, where there are about ten hotspots, in service stations and pubs.

I didn't try any of them, I'm sorry to say.

More for your wireless money?

2006-08-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

As I said yesterday, I can't see why anyone would pay extra for Draft N wireless (it's traditional at this point to add, "...unless you have a real need for higher speeds and don't mind proprietary extensions," but I am having trouble imagining anyone who meets those criteria).

Instead of paying for a bit of extra speed, it's possible to get extra features. The Fritz Box, which I reviewed for Techworldgives you a VoIP PBX and (for those who want it) ISDN support for more or less the same price.

That's my approach: don't get cool, get sensible.

Daft N: why it's "daft", not "draft"

2006-07-31T09:55:00.000-07:00

I don't have much to add to the Draft N controversy. Apart from anything else, Glenn Fleishman's said it all. It's too early to buy these products, because the standard isn't ready.

By and large, the enterprise world has taken that line, and there's not a lot of people rushing Draft N into business-grade products. But we're all looking interestedly at the consumer products bear-pit.

Now that I've played with a couple of Draft N products, I'm surprised how disappointing I was, even given my low expectations. There have been tests that apparently show that Draft N actually performs worse than 802.11g or the mature proprietary exensions thereof, in real situations (ie over some distance).

I actually found the range performance not bad, but compatibility between supposed Draft N products was poor (here's my reviews of Netgear and D-Link products).

What's put it even more into perspective for me, though, is the value proposition. These products cost substantially more than the plain 802.11g routers that they supposedly outperform by a huge margin - but not in any way that makes a big difference to anyone at the moment.

What could you do if you spent that money on something people really wanted? I just reviewed a product for Techworld that gave me an idea of that. For roughly the same price as a Netgear Draft N router, you could get an 802.11g router, with a built in three-line VIP PBX. And some very nifty features in the DSL and WLAN parts of the product.

I'll link to the review when it's live tomorrow.

Do you want high power Wi-Fi?

2006-07-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

It's good to see Ofcom thinking things out. The regulator has looked at the idea of Wi-Fi for rural broadband, and come to the conculsion that it needs more power, for longer range signals. So it wants to allow that. In fact it wants to allow Wi-Fi kit that's 100 times more powerful, at 10 Watts.

But what about the interference you ask? Well, Ofcom looked at the likely way it will all be implemented and came up with the following arguments. Hotspots, office WLANs and home users won't get much benefit from higher power versions of regular Wi-Fi access points - especially since it's going to be more expensive (won't have the economies of scale) a smaller market. Rural providers will jump at the chance to send Wi-Fi links over 10km or so.

In the country there won't be much interference to those directional links, because there's not so many people. In the city, there will be more interference, which - from the nature of things - will affect the broadband link more than the many little WLANs in its path.

So the high power option will get used in the country where it's needed, and won't get used in the city where it will be clobbered by interference, and isn't needed in any case thanks to 8M bit/s DSL.

Do you agree with Ofcom's arguments? Let them know.

Tell us more, Extricom!

2006-07-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

I'm hearing noises about European expansion plans from Extricom - an interesting company, that's putting itself forward as the next generation of wireless LANs.

It has a "blanket" technology that puts every access point on the same radio channel. That's madness according to the usual way of setting up WLANs, but Extricom reckons its a good idea, since devices don't have to roam or change channel as they move round a WLAN. The switch decides which access point to listen to a given device on, and sorts the traffic out itself.

It's similar to what Meru promised, but early indications have been that it's got some differences. We gave it an award at Techworld, and wish it well. If nothing else, it's a perfect proposition as we move to handheld devices that people will walk around with, and voice, which people expect to roam with them as they go.

I've got two issues now. Firstly, I want to see harder evidence. Real implementations, real users we can talk to, and real kit in testing labs. We've seen other interesting companies in the Wi-Fi world show up and disappear (remember Vivato?) when their technology didn't work well enough, or wasn't different enough. At some point, you need to touch something.

Secondly, and more disappointingly for the techie, I want someone to convince me that the wireless LAN market can support a technology change

We've been promised a big boom in enterprise WLANs, for some years now (the latest driver for that boom is supposed to be voice and FMC), but I keep seeing signs that it's not booming as fast as it should be. The old guard of switch vendors - Aruba, Trapeze and Cisco/Airespace - are all making big plays to integrate legacy APs, instead of marching off into the new unclaimed territories.

What if the adoption rate isn't fast enough to support a new technology. Switched WLANs may turn out to be adequat - especially with Cisco promoting then. If the Extricom stuff works, it might still face the proverbial Betamax scenario.

What's the difference between Airtight/Defense/Magnet/Chemistry?

2006-07-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

I've had yet another invitation, to yet another briefing, on yet another WLAN security product.

The invitation goes like this: "X Announces Four-Tiered Network Architecture to Secure, Manage Wireless Networks with Millions of Devices"

Risking a brain hernia, I read on: "X is the only vendor to have a four-tiered architecture and a Managed Network Console capability to be able to manage geographically disperse network segments as an integrated whole – and scale to manage millions of devices. X's architecture is comprised of four tiers: the wireless devices or clients, wireless sensors which see and protect the clients, the server(s) which manages the sensors, and a Management Console which provides visibility, intrusion prevention, and management capabilities across multiple servers and millions of wireless devices."

Apart from that fact that this is godawful writing what's unique here? What is company X promising here, that hasn't been promised over and over by companies X, Y and Z?

I sent back an email that went, in part:

Thanks for the press releases and invitiation to take a briefing on X's latest products. I'm interested, but I am having trouble seeing any difference between announcements from wireless security vendors these days. Doesn't everyone have a "four-tier" architecture including client, sensor, console and server?
I'm even having trouble distinguishing between each vendor's sequential announcements. Didn't you always have a four-tier architecture?
Even for someone as optimistic as myself, there's only a limited number of times I can reiterate and publish a story beginning "AirNetworkMagnetTightChemistryDefense has promised the first
console-managed scalable sensor-based real-time remediating IPS/IDS wireless security and performance management system."
I know there's a real market out there, and Techworld has run positive product reviews of most of the major vendors in this space at one point or another. But I'm really unsure how to handle wireless security announcements like this in any way that's helpful to my readers. I find myself quietly hoping that analysts' predictions will be borne out, Wi-Fi security vendors will all be shaken out and subsumed into wireless network products, and we can move on.

The response? Silence.

Is HP selling Symbol WLAN kit?

2006-07-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm planning to look under the covers of various WLAN equipment in this blog, so I thought I'd start with a recent announcement in the field. In May HP launched a wireless blade for its edge switch. I was reasonably skeptical at Techworld but gave them a couple of cheers.

Prior to this, HP was re-selling a wireless box by a company called Vernier, as the HP 700wl. The Vernier box is essentially a firewall between the wired and wireless parts of the enterprise network. This was a good idea in 2003 to 2004 or so, when companies like Vernier, ReefEdge and Bluesocket sprang up to sell this kind of thing. HP could never bring itself to use the word Vernier but the boxes looked identical.

Things have moved on, and the gateway approach is passé. Vernier is now more of a security company, ReefEdge and still a useful product, ReefEdge closed down, and Bluesocket is shifting to the architecture that won out during 2004 - switched Wi-Fi with thin access points, the approach started by barcode giant Symbol, and popularised by Aruba, Trapeze, and the one that Cisco bought - Airespace.

By the beginning of 2005, thin APs had won, and 18 months on, HP is picking up on the trend, with a wireless LAN switch of its own. Though perhaps I might rephrase that last sentence.

As Cisco has done with the Airespace products, HP is integrating wireless, in a blade for its switches - somewhat cheaper than Cisco's version, and fitting in an edge switch (the 5300, as HP's edge orientation would lead you to expect.

Also, at this stage of the wireless LAN market, you would absolutely not expect HP to build its own switch, when there are plenty around to OEM. But, this being HP, we get the same reticence we had over Vernier.

I quizzed global mobility product manager Kail Krall on the issue, and he said this was "HP technology." Is it HP owned or HP licensed technology I asked. "I can't answer that," he replied. He looked very uncomfortable.

HP's ProCurve networking division doesn't want to admit to not owning and building its technology; it wants to be seen as an engineering outfit. It wants to be separate from the rest of HP - more or less an ink company building a services arm.

But realistically, no-one would respect a company that did something as foolish as build a 2004-style wireless LAN switch from scratch, today. No one would buy a product like that. We know it's from someone else, but they just can't tell us.

So whose is it? I wondered about Chantry, a wireless LAN switch which was fairly well respected in its day, but now gone to Siemens, a company with which HP works on occasion. Apparently that's unlikely - although Chantry isn't dead (I'll come to that in a later post)

The possibility that gets mentioned most is Symbol. HP is selling "radio ports", similar to Symbol's access ports. HP's Radio Port 220 bearing a resemblance to Trapeze's AP300 access port. Sources - not at HP - tell me that both use Intersil radios, and a PPC 405EP CPU, but as this didn't come from HP or Symbol, I'd welcome confirmation or denial.

The surprise is that Symbol is the least interesting wireless LAN switch company. OK, it invented the concept, but it is being left behind, as other people's WLANs get more interesting. Two years ago, it was hamstrung by its insistence on distinctive radio hardware, and I've not seen much to change that. It's struggling to get out of its home area of warehouses and shops into carpeted offices. Its Interop announcement of a unified radio system smacked of marketecture.

HP isn't stupid. It's probably going this way because at this stage, wireless LAN isn't that important. It's not the boom it was supposed to be back in 2004, and it's not that crucial to be ahead of the game. But they can't say that, obviously - it's a new product so it has to be heading for a super-duper market.

It's a shame they can't talk about it in real terms though. When Symbol made a similar blade for IBM's blade server centre, IBM was happy to put Symbol's name on it. When I met Paul Congdon, the CTO of ProCurve last week, I didn't push the issue, because HP folks always get embarassed around this kind of thing. I asked the question, and it bounced off.