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« 3Com Bridge: Harbinger of Next Generation | Main | News for 2/4/2002 »

February 3, 2002

Wall St. Journal: Wi-Fi Makes Broadband Painless

The Wall Street Journal's Tom Weber discusses Wi-Fi in his Monday EWorld column (no link; the Journal charges for access). He writes quite convincingly about a number of issue that those of us who use it regularly already know: it's simple, it works, and wireless ISPs are trying to sort out how to make it a ubiquitous for-fee service.

Weber writes, Somehow, the people developing wireless technology have figured out how to make getting online at broadband speeds relatively painless. And they're getting better at it all the time. That stands in sharp contrast to the tribulations so often experienced by consumers who sign up for cable-modem or DSL service.

Weber mentions using MobileStar and the problems they've faced that forced them into bankruptcy. He talks to Sky Dayton of Boingo Wireless about Dayton's views of striating infrastructure from real estate from account and service. He praises Boingo for choosing a bottom-up percolation of hot spots (which is, as we know, in sharp contrast to some of the early stage players in this space, including MobileStar).

Weber concludes with some advice in the legislative arena, noting that he suggested that those in charge of the laws resist attempts to expand broadband investment until current demand has been met. He says that hot spot networking should be excluded from that advice. Wireless is the exception, because wireless has the potential to spur demand and spark new ways of using the Internet. For those looking for ways to nurture broadband, thwarting any attempts to stifle the growth of wireless should become a high priority.

Business Week argues misery awaits your attempts to go wireless (premium subscribers only): in the best tradition of anecdotal journalism, the writer asserts that misery awaits the faint-of-heart as they attempt to install a simple wireless network in their home. The writer had problem after problem but ultimately succeeded with a lot of help.

Well, he's right, drat it: he confronted all of the typical showstoppers that the average consumer would find baffling, from short range (probably metal or some other strong interferer between the floors in his home) to computers not seeing each other (he wisely had a personal firewall installed but it unwisely didn't alert him to the new wireless network) to asinine tech support policies (Linksys telling him they esentially don't support their own products except in very limited ways).

Now, of course, many consumers in regular ranch style houses or apartments would plug in, have no firewall, and be online in seconds. I've definitely had both the aggravating multi-hour install, but I've had several plug-and-play and walk away successes, too.

The personal firewall is a real problem: I use ZoneAlarm and it's smart enough to warn me when I plug a new device in (such as the Linksys WMP11 PCI card) that a new network is suddently available when it acquires a DHCP address. It gives me the instant option of saying, yes, include this new network in my local zone so that the firewall features don't block other machines.