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AT&T's HSPA 7.2 Isn't Quite What It Seems

By Glenn Fleishman

AT&T didn't want to let T-Mobile steal the initiative on HSPA 7.2: I missed the 5 January 2010 release from AT&T that explained the firm had updated its mobile broadband network to HSPA 7.2; T-Mobile said last week its entire footprint is now HSPA 7.2 as well.

AT&T said last year that it would roll out the 7.2 update--which offers a raw data rate of 7.2 Mbps including network overhead--to most sites by the end of 2010, and its entire footprint by 2011. In Europe, HSPA 7.2 networks seem to operate in a broad range: users report regular performance from about 1 to 4 Mbps. It's unclear how carriers will provision, throttle, or shape HSPA 7.2 here.

AT&T's announcement coming early made it seem like it might have leapfrogged T-Mobile, given that AT&T has more metro areas covered with 3G, and has already sold a fair amount of HSPA 7.2 enabled gear, such as the iPhone 3GS. But that's not the case.

AT&T wasn't trying to pull a fast one, even though it was marketing this move as an enhancement. In the 5 January press release, the company makes it crystal clear that it's upgraded the software to allow HSPA 7.2 even though it doesn't have the necessary backhaul improvements in place to make the network actually faster.

This is refreshingly frank. The release said that the software update would improve network quality even before backhaul improvements that are slated for this year and next are in place to provide increased capacity. I'm sure AT&T is correct. More efficient use of the local link among capable devices means less wasted air time and less congestion, which allows better packet shaping and prioritization. I'm sure local network links function far better at 7.2 Mbps, even if the backhaul can't support the uplink side.

Six cities have the promised backhaul improvements underway: Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami. The release says the updates are site by site, which means you could experience different speeds driving around the same city while the upgrades are in process.

T-Mobile, on the other hand, has been building its fresh HSPA network with the notion that backhaul for HPSA+ (21 Mpbs in its version) will be flooding the grid, and thus has the advantage of not having to deal with legacy installations. It has been able to make all its choices about towers with the notion that each base station may need 20 to 100 Mbps of backhaul. (These are guesses; the company hasn't released that information.)

I continue to find it ironic that wireless networks rely so heavily on wires.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 4:37 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, Future | 1 Comment

iPad Creates New Class of 3G Device, Plan

By Glenn Fleishman

Apple's 3G iPad models will come with two unique aspects: only unlocked, no-contract services: It's not surprising that Apple will have Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi plus 3G variants of its new iPad mobile device. Rather, it's that Apple finally got its demands met about how consumers will control the relationship with cellular carriers.

The iPad will come with a micro SIM, a new tiny form factor for SIM in mobile devices that's not yet in real use, as far as I can tell. (I had never heard of it before today, even though it's a settled 3GPP format.) Steve Jobs said it will be simple to swap out SIMs from other carriers, so that the US version of the 3G iPad will "just work" in most cases outside the US. It won't be until June or July that Apple has carrier relationships for direct sales and data plans other than in America.

The unlocked iPad will be coupled with two data plan options from AT&T, neither of which requires a contract or (as far as I know so far) any cancellation penalty. AT&T has some services now that you can turn on or off on demand, such as navigation.

The 250 MB/mo. plan is $15/mo; the unlimited plan is $30/month. While you might scoff at 250 MB, the iPad will have the same limitations as the iPhone in terms of downloading and storing stuff over the Internet, so outside of purchasing movies, the biggest 3G drain will be streaming video. Because the iPhone OS doesn't support Flash, streaming video must all be embedded H.264 format or accessed via the YouTube app or other applications.

I'm calling the 250 MB/mo plan "your mother's plan," because it's most likely to appeal to people who won't be heavy 3G users, and will mostly use the device over Wi-Fi at home or at hotspots. However, they will want the flexibility of having 3G available wherever when they carry the device with them.

The iPad still is slated to have the disappointing pairing of UMTS for upload (384 Kbps) with HSDPA for download (ostensibly HSPA 7.2 as with the iPhone 3GS); this detail is noted on the Tech Specs page for the iPad. The iPad will likely be a heavier producing device, especially given that there's a camera connection kit (USB or SD card reader) that will let you suck photos directly into the iPad. These will sync with iPhoto when you return to a Mac (or through other means specified in iTunes on a Mac or under Windows), but uploading photos during a trip will certainly be desirable, and limited over 3G networks to the paltry 384 Kbps rate.

I should note, of course, that the iPad will have 802.11n support, but it's unknown to me yet whether this will be a single-stream radio, which would use less juice and thus be more sensible in a device intended to have a long battery life, or a two-stream 802.11n adapter, which will drain it faster. Apple uses USB for syncing large amounts of content, and doesn't provide over-the-air sync for anything directly. (You can use its MobileMe service to sync calendars and contacts.)

That means that the gating factor on most networks will be the Internet connection, not the wireless LAN. Having a 50 Mbps or so top rate with 802.11n single stream won't really be a clog on the iPad's abilities.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:06 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, 802.11n, Future, Gadgets | No Comments | No TrackBacks

WiGig Alliance Finalizes 7 Gbps Spec for 60 GHz Band

By Glenn Fleishman

The WiGig Alliance has hit a planned mark, with a spec going to members and 7 Gbps in the air: The WiGig Alliance is a group now comprising about 30 members, including all major wireless chipmakers, that wants a standard radio platform and standard application profiles for the 60 GHz millimeter-wave band. The 60 GHz band is available with different allotments in most international regulatory domains, with some, like the US, having 7 GHz available. It works best within a single room due to high attenuation from physical objects.

The WiGig Alliance is attempting to avoid the travails of standardized UWB, which took several years to fail at the IEEE, and then more to arrive in scattered fragments in a market that doesn't care, as well as the delays that encumbered 802.11n.

The announcement today is that the group expanded its membership over the last several months, and finalized the first version of its spec, which will be handed over to members to review, and then released likely in the first quarter of 2010. The spec will hit 7 Gbps of raw throughput per channel, up from about 6 Gbps in an earlier draft. As many as 4 or 5 channels will be available in any given space.

The goal is to produce a single radio standard with flexibility, allowing both high-performance and low-power devices that can work interoperably on the same band; and a set of application profiles or purposes, to allow video, data, and other kinds of transmissions to work without being at cross purposes, require separate chips, or emerge from disparate trade groups.

This is contrast to both the IEEE 802.11 Task Group ad (802.11ad), which is developing a WLAN protocol for 60 GHz, and Wireless HD, a trade group led by SiBeam with some overlap with WiGig's membership, and focused entirely on high-definition in-room streaming.

"60 GHz is a whole clean sheet of paper to work on, and to use it only to replace a single wire seems to be a tremendous waste," said Mark Grodzinsky, a board member and the marketing head at Wilocity. There's a lot of things that can happen over it." The group hasn't optimized "so heavily for one particular usage at the cost of others," he said.

Key to the spec's development was the desire to have devices that operate at lower power and consequently low data rates work interoperably on networks and with other devices that are using the maximum data rate, potentially for high-def streaming.

Grodzinsky said that beamforming, for instance, in which multiple antennas are used to steer a signal, could include many antennas for a high-throughput device, fewer for a low-power device, and none at all for an "ultra low power device."

While video may be on everyone's mind, the group has developed a spec that is entirely backwards compatible with existing Wi-Fi standards at the MAC level, including security. With chipmakers deeply involved in WiGig, this could mean WLAN adapters would have 2.4, 5, and 60 GHz radios, and move interchangeably among them based on power, range, and other characteristics.

Ali Sadri, the chair and president of the WiGig Alliance, and the WPAN/60 GHz standards director at Intel's Mobile Wireless Division, said it was critical to have a single specification in place around which all manufacturers could rally.

"90 percent of the Wi-Fi chipsets are being built by the members of the WiGig silicon team," he noted, which could make it easy to gain traction as an extension to Wi-Fi.

Grodzinsky said that the 802.11n standards battle taught everyone many lessons. "We'd like to think that we can learn from our mistakes," he said, noting that there's "no point in being fierce competitors" for technology that doesn't exist.

Many IEEE members belong to firms involved in WiGiG, and it's likely that 802.11ad will be shaped by proposals coming from those groups.

The biggest risk may be devices that share a radio standard but have disparate capabilities, something that the Wi-Fi Alliance faces every day as more protocols and features are added. "There will be a way from a consumer standpoint to recognize exactly what you're buying," said Grodzinsky.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:08 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: 60 GHz, 802.11ad, Future, WiGig | No Comments

In-Depth on Wi-Fi Future Speed, Range, Robustness

By Glenn Fleishman

Over at Ars Technica, I write about how Wi-Fi is getting goosed for the future: It's not all about speed. That's the key message I kept hearing from people who develop and work with 802.11 networks. Rather, future flavors of Wi-Fi will combine aspects of higher throughput, better system capacity (more devices across a node), robustness (removing dead spots), and resiliency (better dealing with network congestion and interference).

It's true that the IEEE is working push 802.11 past 1 Gbps, but that will be likely via 80 MHz or even 160 MHz channels, possible only in 5 GHz and in certain circumstances. Having a greater number of streams per access point may have more impact, by not just improving potential speed, but extending range and filling in coverage holes.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:20 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future | No Comments

T-Mobile Moves Aggressively into HSPA and HSPA+

By Glenn Fleishman

From a carrier with no 3G offerings 18 months ago, T-Mobile has turned the ship fast--and turned the table on its competitors: T-Mobile used today's announcement of a new 3G USB modem to lay out its aggressive plans for 7.2 Mbps HSPA and 21 Mbps HSPA+ deployment nationwide.

Starting from no customers in second quarter 2008 and clutching a handful of 3G spectrum, the firm now covers 240 cities and passes 170m people. T-Mobile's Jeremy Korst, director of broadband products and services, said in an interview that the number will hit 200m by the end of 2009, which covers nearly all the major urban areas. By contrast, Clearwire plans coverage of 120m people with its Wimax service by the end of 2010.

But perhaps more important is that T-Mobile will have 7.2 HSPA, which runs at a raw downstream data rate of 7.2 Mbps, on all its 3G nodes by year's end. On the upstream side, T-Mobile will gradually upgrade to 2 Mbps starting in early 2010.

This contrasts with AT&T's previously announced but much more moderately paced plan that gradually upgrades the current, seemingly overloaded 3.6 HSPA network to 7.2 HSPA through the end of 2011, at which point AT&T will still have only 90-percent 7.2 HSPA on its 3G network. By the end of 2010, only 25 of 30 major markets will have the faster HSPA flavor, the company has said.

The bigger news, though, is that T-Mobile is going full-court press on HSPA+, a 21 Mbps flavor already deployed by several carriers worldwide, and which T-Mobile launched for test purposes in Philadelphia in September. The company will start rolling out HSPA+ in 2010 on a "fairly broad-scale" basis, Korst said.

Read the rest of "T-Mobile Moves Aggressively into HSPA and HSPA+"

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:05 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, 4G, Broadband Wireless, Cellular, Future | 1 Comment

WiGig Unites 60 GHz Wireless Development

By Glenn Fleishman

The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) brings together 17 tech firms for 60 GHz streaming video, LAN standards: The 60 GHz unlicensed band, available for use in various forms worldwide, can carry Gbps of data, but there hasn't been unity about how to proceed. The new WiGig group will focus on streaming video (SiBeam is the leader in this band already), wireless LAN (the IEEE already has a 60 GHz working group underway), and docking/synchronization--a replacement for UWB, which hasn't lit up the market yet, but is at least available right now.

Multi-Gbps wireless LAN networking would be a hoot in the home, especially as we push data to networked storage devices and move ever-larger video and photo files around, but the standard's real potential is in providing for lossless high-definition streaming alongside these other purposes.

The group has been working together for a year, and chose this moment to makes its public debut. A standard is due out in fourth quarter, with testing to follow. WiGig intends to bring its work to the IEEE group on 60 GHz wireless LAN (802.11ad), and many WiGig members are also Wi-Fi Alliance members and IEEE participants. It's possible that 802.11ad will look a lot or entirely like WiGig. WiGig will also create a testing plan and carry out certification.

Bill McFarland, chief technical officer at Atheros, said in an interview today that it's clear consumers will wind up moving increasingly more data around the home. "People will end up with large files and high data rate streams. They're going to want to be able to move it flexibly," he said. Rather than have multiple chips dedicated to different purposes, WiGig is trying to unite it all under one banner.

McFarland noted that 60 GHz has a big advantage: 7 GHz of available in the U.S. and much of the world. "This very broad piece of bandwidth that we can use without licenses, without paying, and it allows us to use it in kind of big chunks, where we can get to very high data rates"--multiple gigabits per second.

The high data rates allow uncompressed HD video--roughly 3 Gbps--which avoids the current expense, possible image degradation, and latency of adding H.264 chips or other compression hardware between the transmitter and receiver.

The WiGig group isn't intending its standard as a Wi-Fi competitor; 60 GHz attenuates rapidly and doesn't penetrate objects well. This limits it to mostly in-room purposes. Wi-Fi in 802.11n can work well throughout a house. The idea of tri-band (2.4/5/60 GHz) chips seems like a reasonable path to take.

I asked McFarland how this 60 GHz effort would avoid the pitfalls of ultrawideband's rocky 7-year road to potential oblivion. He noted that there's no other spectrum available that enables multiple Gbps, and that by bringing together a set of companies involved through the development and marketing chain they can avoid the strife that delayed and may have doomed UWB.

When UWB was initially proposed, the FCC hadn't approved it. Ultimately, regulators worldwide allow UWB, but some have highly restricted the spectrum range, which reduces the number of simultaneous networks and devices, and requires more flexibility in product design. The 60 GHz effort starts with worldwide regulation already in place.

Ultimately, UWB took so long from design to market that "the data rates that UWB offered were not significantly higher than what could be achieved using 11n technology, so there was no strong, compulsive drive" to put UWB in hardware. (UWB started to make noise when Wi-Fi's highest rate was 11 Mbps, remember.)

Mark Grodzinsky, the marketing vice president of startup Wilocity, a firm that will develop chips and reference (and someone who was deeply involved in reconciling 802.11n into a viable standard), said of the 13 firms on the board of directors, "This is a group of companies that really knows how to do this and has done it before very well." Combined, they sell billions of wireless chips each year.

The intent with WiGig is to have several key differentiators that make the technology have multiple factors that can't be achieved with anything today, and that aren't likely to be achieved by any other technology the drawing board. This includes the high speed, but also the notion of multiple applications using a single radio. (This is how Bluetooth has managed to thrive, and it was one of the intents of the WiMedia Alliance for UWB.)

Grodzinsky described wireless docking and wireless display as two capabilities that are highly limited with any technology today. If you have a device capable of eSATA, gigabit Ethernet, and multiple USB streams, but the dock connection is 480 Mbps USB 2.0 or even wireless USB, performance is highly throttled down. A wireless display isn't really possible.

WiGig was also conceived with handheld devices front and center: characteristics that keep power use low are part of the spec from the get-go. Grodzinsky said, for instance, that error correction schemes are only used if errors need to be corrected; other wireless burn cycles on fixing errors when they don't exist.

WiGig's board of directors includes major chipmakers in the wireless space (Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, and Marvell), handset firms (LG, Nokia, and Samsung), PC-focused companies (Dell, Intel, and Microsoft), and consumer electronics manufacturers (NEC, Panasonic, and Samsung). Note there's some overlap among those firms' markets, too. Notably absent is Apple, which rarely joins standards groups at their inception, but is often an early adopter and later board member. Sony is also missing from this list. (Four other firms are "contributors" and not on the board, including more chipmakers.)

SiBeam is also not on the list, although its backers Panasonic and Samsung are. SiBeam is part of the WirelessHD Consortium, which is backed by six firms in the WiGig group, plus Sony and Toshiba. There will have to be a merger or some kind of close association between WirelessHD and WiGig because no TV set or computer will have two sets of chips, and WirelessHD doesn't have a data-transfer focus.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:35 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: 802.11n, Future, Video | 1 Comment

Cablevision's Wi-Fi a Stunt?

By Glenn Fleishman

So claims a Verizon spokesperson: In an article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Comcast's possible plans to follow Cablevision's lead in pairing Wi-Fi with cable broadband are examined. But you have to read the last paragraph first to get the full impact. Verizon thinks it's a marketing stunt for Cablevision to spend $300m to cover the tri-state area of its franchises with Wi-Fi.

Let's start on the telco side. DSL from the central office into people's homes is dead, more or less, despite tens of millions of deployed lines. It's last century's technology. AT&T and Verizon have put their future into rolling out two different methods of fiber: AT&T prefers fiber to the node (FTTN), where they use very high speed DSL from a neighborhood termination point. DSL works extremely well over very short distances. Verizon has chosen the more expensive option of bringing fiber directly to the home (FTTH).

Read the rest of "Cablevision's Wi-Fi a Stunt?"

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:19 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cluelessness, Future, Home, Hot Spot

Femtocellarama: Carriers Opting for In-Home Base Station Offerings

By Glenn Fleishman

Femtocells arrive: Femtocells are cellular base stations the size of typical home broadband modems and gateways, one step below office-building picocells, designed to enhance a mobile carrier's network in interior spaces. I've been skeptical of femtocells for the several years in which they've been discussed as the Next Big Thing Next Year.

Apparently, 2009 is next year. Sprint introduced its Airave last year, Verizon just released its Network Extender, and AT&T slipped up and revealed plans for its 3G MicroCell, which is apparently 2 to 5 months away.

Femtocells vary from VoIP over Wi-Fi (whether via T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home or Skype over Wi-Fi using a USB headset) in that they use licensed frequencies for the area in which the femtocell operates. There's no chance of collision with other users, which makes voice calls for all three operators and data calls for AT&T (the only one of the three to support 3G data) consistent.

Sprint and Verizon's base stations allow up to 3 simultaneous voice calls. AT&T allows up to 4 simultaneous 3G voice calls or data connections. Sprint and Verizon's femtocells work with all existing 2G-compatible handsets, which is pretty much everything; AT&T is restricting its femtocell to 3G for a lot of sensible reasons.

I've written extensively about femtocell announcements and some of the carriers' strategy over in my general tech reporting gig at Ars Technica, but let me run down how this fits into the wireless data world.

Read the rest of "Femtocellarama: Carriers Opting for In-Home Base Station Offerings"

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:08 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, Cellular, Future, Voice

Looking Back at 2008 and Forward to the Years Ahead

By Glenn Fleishman

Let's look back and forward: It's traditional to wrap up the year, during a quiet news period, by looking at what just went by. This is the one time of year that I also prognosticate, and I got lucky: My forecast for 2008 made a year ago turns out to be weirdly accurate. I don't mean to take too much credit, though: I was expecting big news from things in 2008 that were much quieter affairs.

In-flight Internet (over Wi-Fi). It took almost until the end of the year, but this expectation finally became fulfilled not quite in the form or extent I envisioned. Several companies are separately pursuing offering in-flight Internet, but only Aircell managed to put the service into planes. American Airlines, Virgin America, and Delta Airlines all lofted flights in 2008 with broadband on board.

Of course, the expectation was that between 300 and 500 planes would be equipped with one vendor or another's flavor of in-flight Internet in 2008. Instead, the total is about 25 to 30 across those three airlines. Ryan Air's multi-year promise to put OnAir service on its European routes hasn't yet gone into public trials. Southwest and Alaska's promised tests of Wi-Fi appear to be invisible.

Still, Alaska and JetBlue both told me that there's work ahead in 2009, and Delta said it would equip over 300 planes in 2009 in its fleet, and start equipping its merger partner Northwestern Airlines with Internet service in 2009 as well.

We can count 2008 as the year in-flight Internet taxied down the runway; 2009 will likely be the year that it takes off. Whether it's financially viable is a different story; but it appears that service will be available on perhaps 20 to 30 percent of wide-body jetsfor routes within the U.S. in 2009.

Wi-Fi in every smartphone. Here, I feel I nailed it. It wasn't too much to call this, but Research in Motion and other established phone makers still seemed to have a slight resistence to including Wi-Fi. Now, it's de rigeur. The iPhone 3G and first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, shipped in 2009 with Wi-Fi along with Bluetooth, 2G and 3G radios, and GPS. Wireless all around. The BlackBerry Storm was widely criticized for being an iPhone me-too without the quality, but also because it lacked Wi-Fi; most other new BlackBerrys are fully Wi-Fi'd.

Tens of millions of smartphones now have Wi-Fi built in--about 10 million of those are iPhones alone. I'm not sure if the industry tracks this, but the mark of 100 million Wi-Fi equipped smartphones will certainly hit in the first quarter of 2009.

The new trend I call for 2009 is the inclusion of Wi-Fi in so-called feature phones, the inexpensive phones that offer far more limited capabilities than smartphones. Talking to chipmakers and handset makers in 2008 made it clear that Wi-Fi chips will be available in early 2009 with low-enough power at an inexpensive price with better integration for multiple wireless standards. This makes it affordable and keeps batteries from being drained.

Carriers want Wi-Fi as a way to offload usage from celluar networks, especially in people's home, and putting Wi-Fi into feature phones gives carriers an advantage in stretching scarce spectrum even further.

Wi-Fi everywhere. With municipal Wi-Fi in its 2004-2006 form dead in 2007 and buried in the first half of 2008, we've seen a resurgence in efforts to put a plan in place first (why do we need Wi-Fi or some other wireless technology?) and then build a network.

In a round-up for Ars Technica six weeks ago, I highlighted several cities that have working large-scale networks all built for slightly different purposes. These networks are all successful in the sense that they have been built and appear to be working for the purpose for which they were intended. Only time will tell--another year or even two--as to whether the long-term benefits or sustainability are there.

I also said a year ago that 2008 would be the year of hotspot saturation. I think I was right on that. It's hard to find any venue in North America and Europe that lacks Wi-Fi. Boingo's acquisition of Opti-Fi airports and Parsons's Washington State Ferry operations, along with AT&T's purchase of Wayport demonstrated that consolidation had arrived, too. (Wayport operated Wi-Fi in U.S. McDonald's locations, and managed AT&T's Wi-Fi hotspots.)

Starbucks switching to AT&T and offering loyalty-based free service to customers, as well as AT&T radically expanding free access to its hotspot network, dramatically expanded the ability to get Wi-Fi for nothing.

Years ago, I was somewhat excoriated for saying that Wi-Fi hotspot access will either be free or cost you $20. Some people insisted Wi-Fi would trend to zero--some even cite Starbucks 2-hours-a-day loyalty reward as proof, even though you need to make a regular purchase to get the "free" service. Others insisted that you would need several subscriptions, each at $20 to $40 per month, to have a national or international personal footprint.

I wasn't too far off, in the end. If you want, there are now extensive networks in the U.S. and Europe of free hotspots and AT&T gives free Wi-Fi to about 15 to 20 million customers. The Fon network, however you count it, seemingly offers reciprocal free Wi-Fi to as many as hundreds of thousands of its Foneros.

If you want a larger pool of access at premium venues, especially airports and hotels, you can pay a bit more than $20 per month--maybe I should give myself the benefit of inflation, since I've been saying $20 for a few years? Boingo offers unlimited Wi-Fi for North America for $21.95 per month; iPass includes dial-up and Ethernet service as well for $29.95 per month. (Internationally, aggregators meter service because of the exceedingly high cost in some markets. You can get a few thousand minutes a month for about $45 with iPass or $60 with Boingo.)

WiMax arrives. Again, slipping in towards the 11th hour, my prediction that WiMax would be deployed widely enough to see whether it works wasn't precisely what happened. WiMax is commercially available in one market--Baltimore--although reports from reviewers and residents seem to all be positive.

The new Clearwire, a product of the old Clearwire firm and the WiMax division and spectrum portfolio of Sprint Nextel, will launch its first market under the Clear product name in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 6 (badly timed before CES and Macworld Expo). Then they'll start rolling out cities on a regular basis.

Gadget-Fi a go-go. I'm now going on about 3 years of saying that next year, Wi-Fi will be in everything. It's getting there. I'm still waiting for a good implementation of Wi-Fi in a camera, but at least the Eye-Fi adapter--which debuted in 2007 and expanded options in 2008--provides a good substitute.

Apple apparently shipped a jillion iPod touch players; they don't reveal specific model unit shipments, but it's possible that several million iPod touch models are in people's hands.

What's Coming in 2009?

A real security meltdown for some version of WPA. I hate to say this, because it sounds like fear mongering, but after the clever but not significant WPA exploit revealed a few weeks ago, it's clear to me that worse is to come. We will likely see the death of the TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) flavor of 802.11i (supported in WAP and WPA2), at least in the pre-shared key/Personal flavor in 2009 due to additional weaknesses that relate to backwards compatibility with the long-depreated WEP.

Whatever attack results, it will likely still require a lot of effort on the part of the attacker, but will have a chilling effect, and move more people to the AES-CCMP flavor of encryption available only in WPA2.

LTE. Long Term Evolution, the GSM-evolved fourth-generation (4G) cell data standard, should appear in commercial form in 2010, but we're going to hear a lot about it in 2009. We may even see some test markets. Verizon sounds like they promised at least one production market for regular use.

LTE and WiMax convergence. There's apparently enough interest in converging the mismatched elements of LTE and WiMax that we may see a full-fledged convergence effort in 2009. This would mean that nearly all 4G efforts worldwide could come together around two intercompatible standards.

Train Fi. Yes, I've been writing about Internet access in trains for a few years. It's finally arrived. The faster cellular data speeds, the brief huge spike in oil prices, and lengthy tests that have concluded successfully are finally leading to Wi-Fi-based access being installed on commuter and long-haul trains worldwide. In the U.S., the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area could wind up being the largest such deployment in 2009. But train-Fi has broken out all over.

SMS Fi. Twitter or a firm like it will move to supplant the ridiculous cost of SMS, especially for smartphone owners with unlimited data plans, by offering an SMS-like service for a pittance with gateway service to existing SMS offerings. Wi-Fi and 3G will be the preferred method. With carriers pursuing predatory pricing on SMS, the only universal messaging format, an alternative will be formed out of the pressure. Coal becomes diamond.

Very high speed Wi-Fi's first steps. In 2008, representatives most from chipmakers worked through the formation of two new 802.11 task groups for Very High Throughput wireless LANs: one, formed late in the year, 802.11ac will cover frequencies below 6 GHz; the other, likely to be 802.11ad, will cover the 60 GHz band, used for millimeter-band radar and with SiBeam's video streaming approach. The goal is for 1 Gbps or faster raw throughput rates. A timeline isn't yet set; given how the group and manufacturers work, it might be 2010 before we see 802.11ac devices and longer for 802.11ad.

What Was Hot in 2008?

The top stories by page views for 2008 were mostly stories from years before. While readers were most interested in T-Mobile losing its Starbucks contract to AT&T (February), they also looked at a pair of 2003 items on WPA passphrase weakness (my introduction and a paper on the topic), perused my outdated 2006 essay on not buying into early Draft N gear, and followed a dead link from an item about installing a free WPA client (no longer available) for Windows 2000.

Also in 2008, readers were equally interested in a third-quarter 2008 review of Linksys's WRT610 router--but more people read the 2007 review of the preceding WRT600 model. And apparently people still aren't changing their WRT54G's admin password, given that it's the No. 4 story for 2008, but published in 2004.

Perversely, a top story in 2008 was a review I wrote in 2004 of an early Wi-Fi signal finder, a category of product that now seems tediously useless. Showing that people are interesting in what Wi-Fi means (literally), a 2005 story on the origins of the choice of the Wi-Fi name still gets a lot of attention.

Of the top 15 or so stories, all but 2 were from before 2008, and three-quarters were about security.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:07 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Industry

Quantenna: Radical New Design or Great PR?

By Glenn Fleishman

The folks at Quantenna made a splash with their "1 Gbps" Wi-Fi announcement today: Venture-backed chipmaker Quantenna says that they have a tiny chip that should make it easier and cheaper to push high throughput Wi-Fi around a home using wall-outlet adapters. The company claims 450 Mbps of throughput from the highest-end Draft N standard (600 Mbps raw), and that it has a 1 Gbps wireless offering that uses multiple bands and channels to achieve throughput. There's not enough detail to know how proprietary that is, or if it's a form of channel bonding.

Quantenna announced three chipsets and a reference design: simultaneous dual band at raw rates up to 1 Gbps, 5 GHz at up to 600 Mbps, and 2.4 GHz at up to 450 Mbps. The reference design is for a compact wall outlet Wi-Fi extender.

The company said it's using a proprietary version of the 802.11s mesh protocol to allow devices to interact with each other. Quantenna's focus appears to be on spreading signals across a house, such as with streaming high-definition, where lots of bandwidth will be needed as telcos, satellite operators, and cable firms deliver HDTV into homes today, but plan much more in the future. Storing HD and then being able to have multiple live streams sent among devices is apparently the wet dream of those involved in home entertainment.

You can be clever about pushing HD around a home (like Ruckus) or brute force it by flooding an area with high throughput like Quantenna, which isn't a bad strategy, but it's an interesting one. The fact is that there are already market solutions that don't require 450 Mbps of net throughput. The segment they're looking at seems too well developed and small for them to capture a sizeable chunk when products based on their design are released in mid-2009. And as a startup, their ability to sign deals with firms that sometimes take 1 to 2 years to negotiate and sign makes me wonder; their investors might be brokering those deals to make them conclude faster.

Small, integrated chips make a big splash because they reduce the battery drain on mobile devices, allow the use of these chips in handhelds, and can dramatically drop the cost of manufacture both through a reduced bill of materials and reduced assembly costs. Quantenna told several sources that they expect to charge $20 for a single-band chipset and $40 for a dual-band chipset in quantity. For chipmakers these days, that can mean from 100,000 to 1m before the price drop happens. (It used to mean much more, but efficiencies have improved in smaller lots of chipmaking, apparently.)

I've followed chip announcements in the Wi-Fi space for years, and small startups that have unique offerings tend to either get swallowed up in short order (Airgo into Qualcomm) or disappear (the very promising Engim\). Atheros, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Marvell, CSR, and a few others own the market, and that's just how that is. Chipmakers in this industry segment needs millions and then tens of millions of sales to make it possible to recover their R&D costs while sinking money into future R&D for the inevitable next generation.

(Airgo, I might note, was sucked into Qualcomm and sunk without a trace, although it's likely their patents were part of what was of interest; their approach to building MIMO systems was probably integrated into other product lines and multi-standard chips.)

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 3:48 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 802.11n, Chips, Future

Post Your Questions for Philadelphia Wireless Panelists

By Glenn Fleishman

Organizers of day-long discussion about ubiquitous mobile broadband want to know what you want to ask: In Philadelphia on 22-Sept-2008, panelists from AT&T, Comcast, Sprint XOHM, The Wharton School, and Network Acquisition Corporation (the folks who will be operating the former EarthLink network in Phila.) will be on one stage at 6 pm at The Franklin Institute's Planetarium (free, $5 contribution requested, advance registration recommended).

The panel will discuss fourth-generation (4G) networks, including both LTE and WiMax, and discuss what these networks might deliver, as well as how Wi-Fi networks fit into this future.

One of the organizers asked if I'd solicit questions--you can post them below--which they'll try to ask during the panel. The group would then write up responses which could posted in turn here.

The powerhouse that is Kevin Werbach, a professor at The Wharton School, is moderating the event. Werbach has been part of interesting thinking about spectrum for many years, a former editor of Release 1.0, and a former FCC staffer. He'll share the stage with a fairly high-powered crowd, including AT&T's enterprise architect for mobility, the president of NAC, and senior people from Comcast and Sprint Xohm.

The event is part of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter series called MobileMonday, an interesting business group that's trying to provoke discussion and development around mobile technology and access. This particular event is sponsored by local business development organization Select Greater Philadelphia.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:10 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Conferences, Future

Ozmo Aims to Steal Bluetooth's Thunder for Peripherals

By Glenn Fleishman

An Intel-backed startup, Ozmo, plans low-power Wi-Fi protocol modification to compete with Bluetooth technology: Ozmo has developed chips for wireless peripherals like headphones, headsets, and handhelds (the three H's?) as well as mice and keyboards that pair with special driver software for computers to enable a 9 Mbps Wi-Fi-based PAN (personal area network) at the same time a computer is connected via Wi-Fi to a wireless LAN (local area network).

Ozmo apparently is trying to leverage the ubiquity of Wi-Fi, the market reach of Intel (which has invested in the firm and is pushing its technology), and the dissatisfaction with Bluetooth device association and throughput to stick a wedge into Bluetooth's market domination. Well over a billion Bluetooth chipsets have shipped--CSR alone has shipped over a billion--and estimates put half a billion this year into cell phones alone. So there's a large embedded market to overcome.

This new technology, so far unnamed but apparently part of Intel's Cliffside research program, is trying to reduce complexity by reducing the number of standards needed to drive a computer, while increasing the flexibility of those standards. Ozmo and Intel's system would, for instance, allow a simultaneous WLAN connection and a PAN network of up to 8 devices using a single radio on a computer.

The press releases and articles make it quite unclear whether a new Wi-Fi chip would be needed; that chip would almost certainly not conform to today's Wi-Fi standards except in a compatibility mode, given that Wi-Fi has no capacity for PAN-style connections. Ad hoc mode isn't quite the same thing. In the past, extensions to the 802.11 standards that are the basis of the Wi-Fi certification and service mark were allowed as long as basic 802.11 worked as expected.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have been complementary technologies for several years. There were early conflicts--I wrote an article about the severe problems in using Bluetooth 1.1 and 802.11b back in 2001! But those interference and coordination issues were resolved, and Blueooth and Wi-Fi marched forward hand in hand, without any close association between the two trade groups behind the standards and branding, but with a lot of technology acquisitions and mergers on the part of companies that make Wi-Fi gear.

The Bluetooth SIG has been working for years to put Bluetooth on top of ultrawideband (UWB), which is still not readily available in the marketplace. UWB is always next year's big technology, and may be passed by except for applications like high-definition video streaming among a/v electronics. The SIG also announced support in Oct. 2007 for Bluetooth + 802.11, where a Bluetooth device could initiate high-speed transfers using 802.11 (yes, Wi-Fi, but not by that name; no partnership there). Bluetooth plus UWB is likely not available until 2009 at this point; BT and Wi-Fi, not until perhaps 2010. (See my article, "Bluetooth to Add Wi-Fi with UWB Delays in Mind," 2007-10-31.)

It's hard to see how Ozmo builds a place in this infrastructure, even with higher bandwidth, and what Ozmo says is lower power use and a lower cost for their chips, because laptop and desktop makers will need to buy into the Intel/Ozmo ecosystem. The demand for this kind of technology is typically driven by users who buy one component and need their computer to interface with it.

With Ozmo and Intel apparently planning to debut the Wi-Fi chips and driver support next year, it seems like a multi-year process to figure out whether Ozmo can evolve a competitive position to Bluetooth, even as Bluetooth is estimated to be embedded in over 1.2b cell phones by 2012.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:04 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Bluetooth, Future

Can Azulstar Make WiMax Work without Buying Spectrum?

By Glenn Fleishman

Azulstar once pinned its fortunes on city-wide Wi-Fi, but now looks to a special licensed spectrum band to make WiMax work where Wi-Fi failed: Azulstar has been the also-ran in Wi-Fi for some years, I'll just state bluntly and upfront. They built a network in Grand Haven, Mich., in 2003 that's one of--if not the--longest running metro-scale Wi-Fi networks in the world designed for public access. The mayor of Grand Haven since 2003, Roger Bergman, told me, "I got on board personally right away, and I am still on."

Azulstar soon answered several RFPs and partnered up with major firms to bring Wi-Fi to Rio Rancho, N.M., Winston-Salem, N.C., Sacramento, Calif., and most notably Silicon Valley--a set of dozens of cities along with county government and private enterprise all wanting some kind of tiered Wi-Fi across 1,500 sq mi.

While EarthLink, MetroFi, and even Kite Networks (with their extensive Arizona buildout in Tempe launched a bit before any other large competiting network) seized the headlines, and later made news about their stalls, failures, and exits, Azulstar seemed quietly to sink into the sand. The Wireless Silicon Valley deal fell apart, as did Sacramento after efforts to get stakeholder and outside investment seemed to fail to materialize, and the marquee partners--Cisco, IBM, and Intel--just wouldn't step up to the plate to make the project move forward. Azulstar was the lead techology firm, but the money just didn't come. (Both California projects are moving forward with a different set of partners and expectations now.)

Rio Rancho was perhaps one of the biggest letdowns. City manager Jim Payne explained in an interview a few weeks ago, "They had a number of things that were going against them from the start, and they did make an attempt to meet the requirements of the contract." But Rio Rancho voted to not just terminate the contract after years of attempts to make the network work, but rejected a proposal from Azulstar a few weeks ago to switch over equipment on the poles. Azulstar now has to remove all its devices.

All of this might make the typical company head a bit depressed about his firm's future, and less than sanguine about the potential for wireless broadband to work at all. Not so for Tyler van Houwelingen, Azulstar's chief, and I have to admit that he convinced me that the wireless provider has a fighting chance, due to a good combination of timing, spectrum policy, and a large dollop of can-do spirit.

Read the rest of "Can Azulstar Make WiMax Work without Buying Spectrum?"

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:58 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal, Unique, WiMAX

700 MHz Winners Talk: Google, AT&T, Verizon

By Glenn Fleishman

Even the losers win in this auction: The gag order from the FCC over the bidding and results of the 700 MHz spectrum auction were lifted yesterday, and everyone is jabbering. Verizon and AT&T have announced they'll build LTE (Long Term Evolution) cell data networks, a GSM standard, in the 700 MHz band. AT&T says their network will come online starting in 2012; Verizon, 2010.

Google posted on their own blog and told the New York Times that they were happy enough losing, even though they bid to win...sort of. They raised their own bids a few times to keep interest from other players, but were relieved when another bidder topped them. That turned out to be Verizon Wireless. Google managed to get a few types of openness encoded into the band, and they think (rightly so) that it made a difference. An economist notes in the Times article that Google now only has to spend "$1 million a year on a law firm to ensure Verizon lives up to the openness requirements."

AT&T didn't bid on the C Block that Google was discussing, a set of licenses that provide national coverage in a few easy pieces. Rather, they focused on acquiring 700 MHz spectrum before the auction from Aloha Partners (from the previous 700 MHz auction), and spending billions on smaller licenses all over the country that they can pin together. Those licenses are unencumbered by open device, application, and service provisions, so AT&T thinks they got the better deal. A good summary is at Phone Mag.

Verizon for its part said it was pleased with its national-scope licenses. Despite AT&T acquiring lots of spectrum, it's going to be far easier for Verizon to use these nationally defined bands, with consistent performance across all their networks.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:45 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Financial, Future, Regulation, Spectrum | 1 Comment

Mobile Post: The Future of Open with Verizon Winning Auction

By Glenn Fleishman

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:36 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Spectrum

Apple Opens iPhone to Developers, Enterprises

By Glenn Fleishman

Apple adds enterprise features to the iPhone, including 802.1X, and opens it to developers: Today's announcement from Steve Jobs was full of surprises, including the fact that Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync for full Exchange support, and the level at which developers will have access to iPhone hardware and information.

The 2.0 software, free to all current owners of iPhone, will be available in June, which kind of tips the hand as to when we'll see a 3G iPhone, too, I imagine. iPod touch owners will pay a "nominal" upgrade fee, as Apple books iPhone revenue over 24 months and iPod revenue as units are sold.

Apple will pile in all the stuff that enterprises demanded from Research in Motion in the Blackberry platform--and that RIM built in--including support for 802.1X (including WPA2 Enterprise) for authenticated Wi-Fi login, two-factor authentication, certificates, and additional VPN types. They're also adding "remote bricking," a critical feature that allows a stolen or misused phone to be remotely and securely wiped.

On the developer side, Apple is opening up the whole puppy in a way that I didn't expect. I assumed the firm would put limits on whether the cell data connection could be used by apps, but not restrict the Wi-Fi side. The announcement puts nothing off limits except VoIP over cell data, although there's a list of characteristics that software can't contain, such as being malicious or a bandwidth hog. All software is distributed and installed via App Store, available on an iPhone or in iTunes for synchronization. This includes free software. Apple will therefore vet, and ostensibly be able to halt use of programs that exhibit behavior they deem bad. Jobs said, "We can turn off the spigot if we need to." Every app will be signed by a developer certificate.

Developers can have access to location information provided by Google (cell towers) and Skyhook (Wi-Fi) for use in their programs. No mention was made of privacy settings for such. Skyhook's Loki toolbar requires that you grant permission to Web sites that want to obtain your location details; I expect a system-wide approach to that, too.

No mention was made today of a few particular problems with iPhone security, such as the ability to tunnel and traverse a VPN across multiple network media, such as using an iPhone for a secure connection while you travel from work, across the EDGE network, and to hotspots. This likely could be built on top of the enterprise features. You'd also need policy management, such as disallowing certain kinds of connections without a VPN being active or over non-trusted Wi-Fi networks.

Certainly, this is a big step forward for corporate users, mobile applications, and consumer ease on the iPhone platform. The beta is available today to developers; you can become a developer for $99. Amazingly, Apple's developer site crashed and is still unavailable two hours after the press conference ended.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:05 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Enterprise, Future, Hot Spot, Location, Security

Mobile Post: The Flat-Rate Carrier Shift - Margins, Away!

By Glenn Fleishman

While driving by the Fremont Troll, I explain the new flat-rate paradigm of carriers, driven by competition from Wi-Fi, Skype, and other factors

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:32 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Financial, Future, Voice

Starbucks Switches to AT&T, the Next Day

By Glenn Fleishman

Yesterday was pretty overwhelming, trying to sort out all the facts, and the impact: The bits and pieces of this industry-changing deal will keep shaking out until and past the launch. I have some detritus from yesterday to catch up on, as well as some new analysis of what this means. (You can also read my coverage in The Seattle Times, where I discuss this as more of a general business story.)

The Starbucks Card and free access: The press release from Starbucks and three conversations I had with them yesterday finally made clear what the free 2-hours access requires. You need a Starbucks Card, which is their stored-value card, not a credit card. (Their Starbucks Duetto credit card will, however, also qualify.) Starbucks Cards can be purchased at a store with a minimum fill of $5.00 that you can use to buy stuff at the store. Once you have the card, free Wi-Fi service is activated by a single purchase of any amount on the card every 30 days. No purchase is needed each time you use the free Wi-Fi nor for the 30 days following a purchase! (A reader asked whether you also had to be an AT&T subscriber. No.)

AT&T's network scope and pricing: AT&T isn't very clear about what they include in various free and fee roaming packages. After consulting their Wi-Fi site and talking to an AT&T spokesperson yesterday, I think I have the story. DSL, fiber, and business remote-access customers (the 12m we've been discussing) get the Basic package included at no cost, which isn't 17,000 (with Starbucks included) but isn't far off. It's McDonald's (8,500) plus Starbucks (7,000) plus Barnes & Noble (several hundred) and a few other chains/venues and airports that AT&T operates itself. Most U.S. hotels and airports operated by other providers require a Premier subscription, which also adds 53,000 international locations. For those who get Basic for free, the Premier subscription is $10.00 per month; all others, Premier is the only option for a subscription, and it's $20 per month. Pricing is explained, but not very clearly, on their Wi-Fi page; you have to look at that page and then at the location finder to sort this out.

AT&T Wireless customers: There's no deal here for anyone but DSL, fiber, and remote-access business customers. Those will cell plans don't (yet) get anything special. That includes...

...The iPhone: No iPhone update yesterday, but everyone I interviewed was winking slyly.

Media in the stores, and Apple: Starbucks chief technical officer as much as told me that Starbucks has Apple media servers in their stores that feed out songs and previews based on what's programmed in the stores. The move from there to caching digital movie rentals and popular downloads is very, very small. I've written a long piece explaining this for Mac journal TidBITS: Starbucks Deal Brewed with AT&T Has Hints of Apple. You're going to walk into Starbucks, log onto free or cheap Wi-Fi, and download a movie for rental in a few minutes from the local network.

3G iPhone: Oh, yeah, I predict Starbucks will be part of the launch plan for the 3G iPhone, which I would now wager will appear in second quarter because that's when AT&T will have some markets up and running with Wi-Fi in the coffeeshops.

Location: Starbucks CTO Chris Bruzzo also emphasized community, location, and digital experience. He had few specifics, but the idea of bringing in portable devices, like cameras and games, and spending time interacting online in some fashion, yet to be described, with a community that's highly local to the store seemed the theme. He also mentioned location-based services in passing, since each store obviously has a fixed location; T-Mobile was providing some location-based information before this, but more extensive offerings sounds planned. Bruzzo was hip about broadcasting Web services that devices on the network would pick up, instead of talking about a Web browser to Web server equation, which is more laptop oriented.

Many devices, one account: You'll be able to use the same account or Starbucks Card code to bring multiple devices online at the same time, within reason. Bruzzo at Starbucks said it would be handled in a reasonable fashion; an iPhone and laptop logged in at the same time wouldn't cause the system to complain. They'll track MAC addresses--that's adapter unique IDs--to avoid real abuse.

Wi-Fi as glue between home and true mobility: AT&T also told me yesterday that the abundance of "free" in this deal had to do with cementing a customer's connection seamlessly along whatever they do. Joe Izbrand, a spokesperson, said, "The benefit is in our ability to continue to big the largest Wi-Fi connect, to deliver converged connectivity across the board, it's part of what we're trying to do to keep people connected no matter what they're doing, on the home, on the road, whatever. In the competitive marketplace, that's a real differentiator."

T-Mobile and Starbucks: As noted yesterday, T-Mobile data subscribers will have fee-free roaming access onto Starbucks when the transition to AT&T happens in each store, for now and "for years to come" according to a revised statement released late in the afternoon yesterday by T-Mobile. The statement also clarifies that T-Mobile HotSpot@Home customers who use the converged cell/Wi-Fi handsets for calling over either kind of network will also be included in this. The deal lasts "at least the next five years." I don't have details on this, but I have been told that the transfer of provider was abrupt, and I suspect that Starbucks made this a condition of the AT&T deal to avoid any of its customers being upset by a service transition. While numbers of monthly subscribers have never been released, it's likely in the 100,000 to 125,000 range. I can't see many fewer, and it's hard to see decisions T-Mobile made if the number was much larger.

Wayport's catbird seat: The first person I called when I heard about the deal was Dan Lowden at Wayport, a long-time executive who has been through all the changes in the market. Wayport is AT&T's managed service partner, and has the direct contract with McDonald's, to which Wayport resells access to AT&T; they're picking up 7,000 more locations to manage through this deal. "I think this is some of the biggest news in the industry ever," Lowden said, and I am loathe to disagree; the only other news that might qualify as "bigger" were failures, such as the shutdown of Cometa, which ultimately has made little difference in the market's evolution. In fact, the original Starbucks deal with MobileStar in 2001 was one of the factors that launched hotspot deployment at a faster pace. I asked Lowden about the role of mobile devices in their networks. "We work with a lot of these device manufacturers as they're coming to market" to ensure a good connection experience, Lowden said.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:55 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Financial, Future, Hot Spot, Media

Bluetooth Will Add 802.11 for Bulk Data Transfer

By Glenn Fleishman

The Bluetooth SIG says a 2009 standard will integrate Bluetooth and 802.11 in a tighter, more complementary relationship: The group that controls the Bluetooth standard continues the evolution towards agnosticism about underlying radio stuff. The latest move takes advantage of the side-by-side deployment of the "winning" wireless specifications: Bluetooth for PAN (Personal Area Networks) and Wi-Fi for WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks). Bigger files will automatically be sent over Wi-Fi. Sounds simple, no?

"Bluetooth is great right now for sending some of these less bulky data files," said senior marketing manager Kevin Keating, but with the "bulk transfer of entertainment data, whether it's piles of MP3s or a bunch of vacation photos you want to move off your cameras or on your PC, it's not really built for that."

The SIG made this announcement this afternoon at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona; Bluetooth is built into hundreds of millions of cell phones worldwide in its current form, and is near two billion devices shipped in all form factors. That number went from 1 to 2 billion in about two years.

The new standard, called Bluetooth High Speed, will allow a Bluetooth adapter and drivers to identify bulk transfers and move them from the lower-powered and slower Bluetooth radio technology to more battery intensive, but faster 802.11.

They're really talking about 802.11 and Wi-Fi nearly interchangably, but this standard doesn't yet have any formal involvement from the SIG's counterpart, the Wi-Fi Alliance, which controls the certification process for Wi-Fi and the trademark. Keating said, "Wi-Fi is its own brand, and we've talked."

It's important to remember that Bluetooth is both a set of profiles that define behavior--applications and schemas for data in those applications--and a radio standard. Bluetooth was originally developed with its own communications spec (the MAC and PHY, in technical terms) that worked at 1 Mbps; the 2.0+EDR and 2.1+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) bumped that to 3 Mbps. (Version 2.1 also dramatically simplifies pairing between devices; it's rolling out widely now.)

These profiles include things like HID (Human Interface Device) for keyboards and input devices, DNP for dial-up networking, GOEP (Generic Object Exchange Profile) for file transfer, and so forth. The profiles are at a layer of abstraction above the interface and radio part, which makes it relatively simple to repurpose them across many radio standards.

In that vein, the Bluetooth SIG has already disclosed plans for its support for ultrawideband (UWB), whenever PCs with UWB or adapters start appearing in great provision, and their own ultra low power version of Bluetooth for things like heart-rate monitor, bike cyclometers sensors, and other low-data-rate devices.

The Bluetooth SIG says prototypes using the high-speed standard will be tested this year, with a published spec due in mid-2009, and devices presumably long before the end of 2009.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:00 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Bluetooth, Future, Standards

Is Apple Prepping WiMax for Laptops?

By Glenn Fleishman

Speculation is rampant around early glimpse of Macworld Expo banners: The banners (normally not seen until after the keynote) read "There's something in the air," which David Morgenstern speculates could refer to the inclusion of mobile WiMax (which he bucks the trend and calls WiMax Mobile, for some reason). I hesitate to stick my neck on the line, but I think it's unlikely Apple would push mobile WiMax at this point. But I've been wrong before.

Back in 2003, I said that Apple wouldn't introduce 802.11g products at the January Macworld Expo event because 802.11g wasn't yet well baked, and Apple wouldn't expose its customers to months of firmware updates and incompatibility issues with other Wi-Fi adapters and base stations. I was wrong! It took eight months of firmware fixes to get 802.11g just right, but we lived through.

In 2007, I thought it unlikely that despite the presence of what seemed like 802.11n chips in many Intel-based Macintoshes dissected by those interested in the innards that Apple would jump the gun on the standard which was still not clearly settled in its direction. Again, I was wrong: Apple pulled the trigger, and announced its 802.11n product and an activator for most Intel Core 2 Duo based Macs that had shipped to that point. A few days later, the IEEE group voted overwhelmingly to approve the draft of 802.11n that settled the issue as it moves to ratification.

Thus my track record is poor on Apple's wireless plans. Nonetheless, I think WiMax isn't in the cards. Rather, it's more likely for Apple to build in HSPA (high-speed packet access), the GSM evolution standard for 3G. I haven't seen this speculated elsewhere, so I may be totally off base, but here's my logic.

Mobile WiMax isn't yet deployed. With 802.11g and 802.11n, you could buy components from Apple and immediately use the higher speed for your own network. With Mobile WiMax, most Mac owners won't be able to access a network, for which they will have to subscribe or pay usage fees, until mid- to late 2008. People generally resent paying for technology they simply cannot use. Apple would also take a margin hit for including the internal adapter, which isn't in wide production yet.

In that light, HSPA is a more reasonable choice with its few hundred Kbps upstream and several hundred Kpbs downstream average performance. AT&T, its iPhone partner, already has HSPA networks deployed in the U.S.; it's determined to roll them out nationally, although its unclear what areas have the slower UMTS standard--faster than EDGE, slower than HSPA--and which have HSPA.  (HSPA is often labled as HSDPA for the 3.6 Mbps or 7.2 Mbps raw "downlink" flavor and HSUPA for the 1.9 Mbps or 5.8 Mbps upstream flavors.)

The 3G iPhone will incorporate HSPA, and thus it would make sense for Apple to not be building in technology that's tied to a rival--Sprint Nextel--to its main and exclusive phone carrier partner.

What's more likely, however, is that the "in the air" has something to do with streaming media, a revised Apple TV, and new content than with a new network standard. But given my 0 for 2 record, you might want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:52 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Consumer Electronics, Future, WiMAX