Transcript

Glenn Fleishman: This is Glenn Fleishman, the editor of Wi Fi Network News, and this is podcast #13, recorded August 1st, 2006. And, today,hh we're going to talk about Unlicensed Mobile Access, or UMA.

I'm talking with Steve Shaw, the director of marketing for Kineto Wireless, a firm that knows probably about as much as anybody on the planet about UMA because it's their bread and butter. They're the company that's helping integrate this convergence between Wi Fi and cellular into a real product that'll hit the marketplace. So welcome to the podcast.

Steve Shaw: Thanks Glenn, I'm glad to be here.

Glenn: Before we talk about what Kineto does, let's talk about UMA as a whole and we can figure out where you guys fit into this puzzle. So, Unlicensed Mobile Access, the unlicensed part obviously intriguing, the mobile part obviously intriguing, how does UMA fit together? What does it actually do?

Steve: Well, the vision behind UMA is really for mobile operators to take advantage of unlicensed spectrum, things like Wi Fi or WiMax, or things outside of the standard GSM and UMTS spectrum ranges, and provide seamless mobility between those networks to get a lower cost of service, a lower cost of delivery of service primarily for consumers or subscribers and their enterprise.

Glenn: So they idea is you've got like, a Wi Fi network at home or at the office that's got some amount of bandwidth that's unused or doesn't need very much bandwidth for the voice part, and I've got a cell phone which is using, sometimes scarce sometimes crowded licensed spectrum. So I've got a cell phone and what's going to enable me to use that Wi Fi network?

Steve: Well, mobile operators have always looked for a way to lower the cost of providing services, specifically in the home or in the office. When you're driving down the street, and the mobile network is a tremendous engineering marvel quite frankly, the ability to actually drive down the street and maintain productivity and place calls and that sort of stuff, and there's a certain amount of cost that goes along with providing that kind of mobility and that kind of network on a global basis.

But in the home where we'd all have our fixed line services and now we're starting to use Skype services and Voice over IP (VoIP) services, the value of mobility and the cost, specifically, that's associated with that mobility comes at a price. And the mobile operators have always been hamstrung by the price and performance of their service when indoors. The ability to take advantage of the public Internet and Wi Fi technology in the home and the office to lower costs and to make mobile service essentially cost competitive with the fixed line, or even with some of the VoIP plans, gives mobile operators an opportunity to really take all of the minutes of use off the fixed line network, and to give us as a consumer no reason to use any other device except our mobile phone. That's the vision of UMA.

Glenn: So let's talk about how UMA works then. So I'm out roaming around and I'm not near any Wi Fi affiliated hot spot or any Wi Fi network that I use routinely, and I've got a cell phone that's got cellular standards built in, GSM or another, CDMA or whatever, and it's got Wi Fi built in. And I walk into my house, and depending on how the phone is configured, it's going to switch over to connect to my Wi Fi network whether I'm in the middle of a call or place a new call. How does the voice traffic get transited over the Wi Fi network and the Internet, where does it actually wind up?

Steve: The way UMA works is the phone, like you said, has a profile; the profile would probably be your home, your office, maybe a hot spot network as well. And periodically, the handset will wake up from the GSM mode and turn on the Wi Fi radio and say, "Well, are there any access points nearby that fit this profile." You really don't want your phone to be promiscuous, out looking for any Wi Fi access point at any point. You want sort of a targeted service approach, so in the home, in the home, maybe if you're T Mobile or a T Mobile hot spot network.

If the phone sees an access point that's part of its profile, it will initiate a setup and authentication procedure. That process is the establishment of an IPsec tunnel back to a controller that sits on the network.

Glenn: We should define the IPsec as a very robust security standard for doing, essentially, it's often used with Virtual Private Networks to "tunnel" encrypted data, so that you're on a very secure call there, right?

Steve: Yeah, it's almost exactly the same as what you'd use with your corporate laptop if you take it home and tried to work from home. You'd set up a VPN tunnel from your laptop back to the corporate facility. It's the same type of technology. UMA wasn't out to create anything new. This is, like you said, powerful encryption technology, which makes sense.

Glenn: And this is trying to conform to, because the cellular network after the very early years there was some concern about security and people listening to calls and decoding calls, the cellular telephone system now is extremely robust in terms of protecting calls against snooping because it's all digital, it uses advanced technology. So this is trying to provide a comparable means for the calls over this Wi Fi connection, over this unlicensed connection that exists over the licensed connection is what it sounds like.

Steve: Absolutely. And I think you pointed out the mobile community has set a bar in terms of call encryption and subscriber authentication that needed to be replicated when moving to the public Internet. That's what UMA, a large part of UMA, does is defines how to maintain that security bar and the subscriber authentication bar that was set in the mobile network. How to replicate that on the public Internet and over Wi Fi.

Glenn: Well in... sorry, please go ahead.

Steve: I was going to say, not luckily, but in fact most standards already existed, and what UMA did was simply align the existing specifications like IPSec and Internet2, and an extension known as EAP-SIM, together to sort of replicate the subscriber authentication process that happens in GSM and now make that happen over the public Internet.

Glenn: So to make UMA work obviously there are various components that you've got: handsets that do cell and Wi Fi and can handle seamless switchover; you'd need, someone has to have Wi Fi networks that they have access to in some form--they have to have it at home or it has to be a hot spot network, or both that they have some connection with; and you've got to have the back end technology which is, I know where Kineto comes in. For one piece of the puzzle, Kineto develops the back end technology that allows the authentication, the billing, the call handoff, all the other signaling details that need to happen.

So let's walk through the value chain. Handsets, I keep hearing it seems like every day there's another company announcing we're going to have or we have a converged handset. What's the state of that market, in terms of being able to go out and, not necessarily use but let's say go out and buy something today that's got UMA built in?

Steve: Still a bit early for the average consumer on the street to get a hold of the technology. The adoption is sort of occurring similar to other radio access technologies. We look at what happened with GPRS with EDGE, even to 3G to a lesser extent. What tends to happen is there's a couple of early pioneer operators, in this case, operators like Telecom Italia, Orange, TeliaSonera, all in Europe, has announced. British Telecom has a service out there. There's a lot of rumors about T Mobile in the U.S. launching a service.

Glenn: And the big thing is that T Mobile, they don't have 3G spectrum in the U.S. really, they say they don't have enough to launch that, but there's been talk about them trying to use UMA as a differentiator because they have 7, 000 hot spots, they've got a really good GPRS service that's got a flat rate, but they want some kind of additional differentiator and so UMA might be that.

Steve: Right. And, just going off of publicly stated information, I have no inside information here but, a lot of the complaints that drive some churn in the industry, certainly in the U.S., has been related to indoor coverage and the ability to use a Wi Fi access point to boost your signal strength indoors is a perfect fit certainly for the U.S. market. I think it's a little less of an issue in the European market.

Glenn: This is actually an interesting thing too. So we go from handsets, that markets are developing. Let me actually sidebar something we didn't talk about at the beginning: UMA is a standard, I mean this is something that I'll say I'm actually naive, only came to my attention a few months ago. I thought of UMA as a rubric, like this is a description of converged Wi Fi cellular calling and it doesn't define anything, but UMA is actually a defined standard that's part of the 3GPP Association's very complicated named standards. [both laugh]

Steve: The third generation partnership program (3GPP) which is the standards setting body for the GSM community.

Glenn: Right, so if UMA is enabled in a phone it's not going to be, "Hey we can do a handoff" it's going to be "We can do this specific kind of handoff." Other companies or other operators might choose, you know, an operator could go to a handset maker and have something proprietary that's off standard but it wouldn't be UMA.

Steve: True, and that's always a huge fear for certainly handset manufacturers and also the carriers as well. They don't want to get locked into a single vendor solution. They want to know that they can go to anybody and say, "I'd like a product that conforms to technical specification 43 318" which happens to be UMA. There's no ambiguity there, I think that was a huge milestone for the specification because suddenly because the handset community sort of opened to the requests from the mobile operators and said, "Ok, now that there's something out there, now that I'm not going to get locked into this Kineto thing, that I can build to a published and global specification I can move forward with the technology safely. And whether Kineto lives or dies by what happens to the marketplace, I know that I can go on because the specs are published."

Glenn: Well, and this is something that I realize that out there right now are some phones, some smart phones and certain handsets in I think pretty limited production that let you say make a GSM call or a Wi Fi Voice over IP (VoIP) call possibly with a voice partner, not with a carrier, but that's a mode I'm switching between one more or another mode, it's not as a consumer or a user. I'm walking along and I just don't care, it's not of interest to me what network I'm on, it's just that I always get good connectivity and a good signal.

Steve: Right. And what that really equates to is having two services on your phone: you have your standard GSM service, and then you have another service, for lack of a better name the Skype service, or some other type of service that's available when you have the Wi Fi radio on. As a consumer I don't think that's what we really want. If the price disparity is so great, we will put up with some pain and suffering to make that work, but if the operators can come up with a package that says, "You know, for a nominal fee you get unlimited calling over the IP network" there's really not a lot of incentive for us to go through the hassle of trying to manage two services on our phone. We really want one service, one phone number that works.

Glenn: Well, and the technology is capable of it. It would be one thing if this were impossible, but it's not impossible, it's just a complicated dance. So let's talk about the middle piece then before we talk about the back end part. Let's say I've got my new Nokia/Samsung/TI whoever is making the phone I'm walking around with this phone, and where am I going to be able to use this? This has been one of the issues is you talked about having different profiles: is this the kind of thing where hot spots are going to play a big part of this? I know that Kineto has a partnership with Boingo. I know that BT has a lot of hot spots in their open zone in the U.K.

Is it really going to be home in business Wi Fi or is it going to be I'm sitting in Starbucks and because I'm using a T Mobile, a putative T Mobile system, it's going to pick up there as well?

Steve: I think there's a certain amount of sort of technical gee whiz factor that goes along with hot spots, but when you look at the business drivers for the operator, the business drivers are particularly in the home and the office. That's where they see a revenue upside from moving minutes from the fixed network to the mobile network. When you're at a hot spot and you want to make a phone call, you're not going to use your fixed line, there's no such thing as a fixed line.

In effect, all they're doing is giving you a discount on using your mobile phone or you're going to use the GSM network anyway. There's some, like I said, gee whiz factor but the business drivers behind this are targeting consumers in their homes and enterprise users, quite frankly.

Glenn: And I assume that this is going to be one of the interesting parts too is that let's say college students my wife and I had a babysitter this last year who is 18 and it was fascinating to understand how she's using a phone that's not in the area, it's a California phone number in Seattle, which is like "Why is this 415 number coming up?" She uses, everything is by phone, she may have a phone in her room; she doesn't know. I heard a great story the other day about an undergrad who did not know that she could make outgoing calls from the phone in her room, the actual fixed line phone. It makes sense: the phone rings, but why would you ever use that when you've got the mobile phones?

So you've got, one must imagine billions of cell phone minutes that are being used on college campuses that you have robust Wi Fi networks. Most colleges have or are building them, so is that, I'm sort of setting this up for you to say yes but you can tell me no, is that going to be one of the markets that drives the adoption of UMA phones is that sort of college and young person market?

Steve: Certainly, because there's two aspects to it. One is as voice becomes a commodity or arguably is a commodity the operator needs to embrace the lowest cost technology just to survive in a commodity business. With operators like T Mobile offering 1,500 minutes for $40, even if it only costs you a penny or two a minute to make a call over the GSM network as an operating expense to the operator, that's still $15 to $30 out of that $40 of revenue that's going simply to operating expense.

They must move these ultra low cost calling plans to IP, they've got to offload the GSM network because it's too expensive. The second bit though is now you end up with a broadband connection on your phone. No one gets 11 megabits out of their 802.11b, but I'll tell you what: it's 100 times faster than what you're getting from EDGE, and it's ten times faster than what you're going to get from UMTS. Most of the technologies we're talking about today are b/g radios in the phones, and it's really going to make the consumer experience for multimedia that much better.

The broadband network is unbelievably fast when compared to the cellular network. It's exceptionally low latency, and it's really ideal for some of these multimedia applications that are being envisioned. Without getting into the whole "Where is 3G going and what's the consumer demand for all that?" I do think that there is a whole new generation of phone users are coming that are saying, "You know what, I'm going to want to set up a video call, and I'm going to want to video share my this or that or whatever, " and I think being able to make that happen over IP and Wi Fi is going to absolutely be critical for the long term success of these services.

Glenn: The other missing piece too is, this moves us to slightly outside UMA but let's take a walk outside that bubble just for a second, is cached content is going to become more critical. I hear this from every industry I talk to now whether it's putting Internet access in trains or on planes, or for travelers or what have you, one of the trends that's happening is that more and more handsets are going to have hard drives in them in the future or extremely large flash memory content.

And when you talk about the value of the broadband network I think, well, if it's YouTube generation and somebody queues up YouTube clips they want to download, when they're on the expensive 3G network, the minute they're near a hot spot or home network, the phone then downloads the clips at a high speed and they can play them back whenever. There seems to be a big component there too of that opportunism of grabbing a broadband connection when it's available instead of using expensive 3G minutes.

Steve: Right, absolutely. If you're going to have a big pool on your phone, then you're going to need a big pipe to get in and out of it, and Wi Fi is proving to be that technology.

Glenn: One other part of this value chain too is MVNOs Mobile Virtual Network Operators these are companies that, for the benefit of the listeners, who purchase access from cellular networks and resell it under their own label. So you have like Helio, Earthlink-SK, a telecom co venture that Sky Dayton heads up. You've got Virgin in multiple countries and so forth, these companies I would think would have a huge interest in UMA. Does that make sense for them because they're buying minutes?

Steve: Absolutely, and in fact we see the opportunity for almost a Wi Fi only plan where you pay a premium to be on the GSM network. Certainly for some of these college campus type environments where the vast majority of the time they're going to be in their dorm rooms or on a campus that's already wired for a flat rate of $10 15 a month you could have unlimited calling or unlimited access to services over IP, and then just pay a premium to be on the GSM network. The value proposition is tremendous for an MVNO.

Glenn: That's fascinating because then they move up to GSM, GSM isn't the fundamental thing but they have it in the phone, and they have the UMA in the phone so when they want to use it it's completely available.

Steve: Absolutely.

Glenn: That's fascinating.

Steve: There's some interesting opportunities out there. I think at this stage it's still too early. Most of the operators we're talking to have not made their UMA technology or their UMA approach available as MVNO's they want to get the technology off the ground themselves, learn from it and see what's happening before they open up the floodgates and see what happens.

Glenn: Well, let's talk about the back end now. We'll get to the key Kineto part here too. Here, from your vision of what the company does too, is this is the piece that's the hardest piece from what I've heard: it's one thing to put Wi Fi and cell into a handset, like that's gotten easier, you have a lot of converged chipsets, every chipmaker is working on that problem. All the issues about quality of service, 802.11e for Wi Fi, is now a solved problem, it's in devices, it'll be in handsets to give voice calls priority on networks that support it.

So all that is the front end, the consumer will understand it, the consumer won't have to do anything. My understanding is that the back end has been very difficult. That actually it's been the integration of how do you have two simultaneous connections on a cell handset that are coordinated in such a way that there is a seamless handoff. So tell me a bit about how the back end of the UMA connection works.

Steve: Well in fact I think this is sort of the brilliant simplicity of what the framers of the UMA specification put together. They really looked at what already happens in the mobile network and quite frankly, a lot of the hard stuff in terms of mobility had already been worked out. You drive down the freeway and your call gets handed between cell antennas and base stations and then actually between switching centers.

And as the mobile network has become more robust, it's really ironed out a lot of the kinks to the point where there aren't a lot of dropped calls. You don't see those sort of hard boundaries that you used to see in some of the early days of mobile. What UMA defined, and I say the elegant simplicity of it, is that to really take advantage of the existing mobility aspects of the mobile network. So what we're doing is taking advantage of how a mobile phone already hands between antennas and what we've done is created a new "antenna" called a UMA network and through some of the secrets off the back end, the phone essentially says, "Hey you know what, I'm ready to hand over, this new cell site is stronger signal for me than that old cell site."

And it sort of spoofs the cell network into thinking that it needs to hand that call over, but it uses the existing technologies.

Glenn: But to make this work you'd have to have the cell network, and tell me if I'm totally misunderstanding this, but you mean any handset that supports UMA has to be able to support simultaneous cell and Wi Fi connections at least for the period of time during which those handoffs are occurring.

Steve: Absolutely. Both radios are on.

Glenn: And that's a position of the past, I know, because there used to be less of a one radio choice, or there were issues about handoffs with radios, sort of a software switch, so that's going to be one of the key aspects of the handsets involved.

Steve: Absolutely, and in fact with our discussions with the handset community, there is sort of this local area radio technology, i.e. Bluetooth and Wi Fi elements that are sort of becoming converged, and then more of the macro network elements that are being converged. The GSM will become GSM radios with the HSDPA technology. And I think that's proving to be sort of how the technology comes to market in terms of the handsets, and so bridging the gap between those local radios and the macro radios is exactly where UMA fits in.

The goal of course was to take advantage of a lot of the technology that's already built into the network, and I can explain it fairly simplistic; of course, making it happen on the back end is quite complicated.

Glenn: I was going to say, and this is my understanding too, is the reason UMA is gaining traction and so much interest and not necessarily so much deployment yet but that's about to sort of break though, is that the cellular operators love the fact that they could gain advantage of a essentially new, free, unpaid spectrum without having to build entirely new systems on the back end that you're tying in, or that UMA ties into existing billing or authentication and so forth.

I never heard the term that you're spoofing another sort of "antenna" on the cell network, but it seems like that's what's happening on the back end too, regardless of the complexity of making that part happen. To a cellular system, this is just another cell call, right, the way this is going to do it?

Steve: Exactly.

Glenn: That seems like the simplest part of this: an operator doesn't have to be that excited to put one more piece of equipment on their network that simply makes it look like there's more cell calls coming through.

Steve: Absolutely. And to some extent, by plugging this interface between them and the mobile core and the public Internet, you now give your subscribers access to your services anywhere over the Internet, anywhere in the world, which I think will, as the technology evolves and more deployments happen, will begin to impact things like international roaming.

Glenn: Yeah, we haven't even talked about that. Right, UMA is all about convergence. I'm on my national plan in the U.S., I'm using Wi Fi for better reception or cheaper minutes or what have you, then suddenly I'm in Switzerland and I've already paid $20 or something insane for a day's worth, I think in Switzerland you can pay $30 or $40 for a day's worth of hotel Wi Fi. I've already paid that, so now I can make unlimited calls back to the U.S.

Steve: Absolutely.

Glenn: And that's been one advantage of VoIP, of Vonage, of Skype, all these things that you sort of have a country less phone and UMA is going to deliver some of that too, ostensibly.

Steve: Right. What IP has done is separated the access network from the service that's being delivered, fundamental. Right? And by taking mobile service and putting it onto an access independent network, IP, you now get a lot of the same characteristics and properties. This is geared towards primarily mobile operators so it does replicate a lot of control and management that's built into it, but the competition for our calling minutes is fierce. Certainly Orange has become one of the big proponents of UMA internationally. If you look at the French market things have just gone haywire.

There's a company called Free that gives you local calling, broadband, and 30 channels of television for 40 Euros a month, it's a stunning package.

Glenn: You can get free ADSL if you sign up for certain mobile packages in Britain.

Steve: Exactly.

Glenn: There's like three companies that offer eight megabits per second at home for 20 pounds a month if you have some other package with them.

Steve: And certainly in those cases, putting your mobile service over that free broadband you just gave your consumer, that's just a no brainer, it's incredible.

Glenn: The prediction is going to be, and I know you're in the industry and selling equipment to the industry, we'll make that clear, but I hear this from every other source, I'm not just hearing this from the UMA industry or the cell operators, UMA seems poised to be huge because it's a win win for everybody, right? This is one of the things: consumers and people get burned in the past by mobile calling plans, and there's so much competition worldwide that it's becoming pro consumer as they're fighting for minutes.

UMA seems like, as a consumer, I'm going to ostensibly be able to make more calls at higher quality for less money and the operators are going to make more money off me at the same time. Is that possible?

Steve: It's amazing and yet true.

Glenn: This is what it seems like.

Steve: I've seen some exceptionally detailed reporting from major operators or around the world who look at things like, so here's a sample plan and this is in fact what Orange is looking to roll out: unlimited to calls to all Orange consumers, excuse me Orange mobile subscribers, as well as any fixed line in France for a flat rate of 10 Euros a month.

Glenn: Holy cow!

Steve: You take your UMA phone and you're attached to their DSL network, their LiveBox network, and you get essentially unlimited calling for any Orange mobile subscriber as well as any fixed line in the country for 10 Euros a month. And so, you think, wow, my minutes of use are probably going to go up dramatically. Absolutely. What's nice is that your operating expense does not go up dramatically because you're not installing new cell capacity or anything like that.

You as an operator get to collect an extra 10 Euros that you weren't going to get, or were going to struggle to get in going forward. You build a new set of loyalty with this consumer in the face of this crazy broadband and telephony market that they've got going in France. And it really sets you up for locking your subscriber into that DSL network, the mobile service that you've got. And if you're France Telecom, the fixed network that you were using to deliver those voice calls, the voice minutes before, that was all heading towards zero with VoIP.

Glenn: [laughter] Right.

Steve: Now it can take those and save them and put them onto the mobile network and actually collect some revenue for it, so it really does sort of round out the game in terms of a win win.

Glenn: Well that's always fascinating when they can work that way because that, if you're a capitalist which I have to admit I am, I like it when businesses can make more money by being more efficient or making more efficient use of the services. And at the same time, that competition increases both the options for consumers but also the affordability of it where they're getting more service, less money, and everybody wins. How nice to be at the time.

Of course the deal is here UMA, like so many other technologies, there's this leveraging effect that there's this ridiculously robust multi trillion dollar Internet infrastructure that just seems to work at this point and it's cheap enough to gain access to it so we're all leveraging the IP infrastructure in the end. We're paying something for that but in the end this is part of the benefit that we get.

Steve: Right. Well, people do say well how big is it going to be, and what's the impact, and all that stuff. And they do come back to the macro vision of the world and say you look at a company like a Wal Mart, who is a relentless investor in technology and in innovation, to lower the cost of providing services. And if you're going to be in a consumer business, a consumer commodity business, you must take advantage of the lowest cost network infrastructure that you can.

You've got to look at every way you can to optimize the service that you're delivering, and like you said Glenn, it's the same service that I was getting as a consumer, it's no different. I use my phonebook the same way on my phone, I download ringtones, I play games, everything is exactly the same it's just cheaper.

And that aspect plays out well for us as consumers, but I think it makes it an imperative for every operator to investigate how to take advantage of IP and broadband. Just doing this over the cellular network, even though costs continue to come down and new technologies are around the corner, I would never bet against the public Internet to be the lowest cost delivery of service for us as consumers. It's just going to be the way it happens.

Glenn: I know the biggest concern has always been quality of service, but Bob Frankston, one of the inventors of VisiCalc and also the guy who invented Network Address Translation, but don't blame him for that Bob Frankston has been saying for years from a pretty knowledgeable standpoint is that we don't need quality of service, what we need is more bandwidth because with more bandwidth you don't have to differentiate between among services. [laughter]

And part of the issue is "but how do we get more bandwidth?" We're starting to see that: we're seeing FiOS, Fiber To The Home, Fiber To The Node, increased DSL/cable modem speeds, all aspects seem to point to most consumers with broadband having substantially more broadband service. So at that point then, all the things that you talk about, these issues with the quality of service, may still be some slight issue but with enough broadband we can seemingly do anything.

Steve: True. Absolutely.

Glenn: That's great. Well, thank you for the report. I think we did a thorough run through here of UMA and I hope that listeners who are interested in this subject, let us know if you want to know more about it because there are many different aspects of UMA to explore. And so here I'll ask you for your one prediction, even though you're in the industry, you sell to the industry, let me ask you for the prediction. 2007, I know British Telecom is planning its big UMA launch, their schedule. Is 2007 going to be "UMA Everywhere" or is that still going to be an ongoing development year?

Steve: There will be, I think we will be anywhere from a half a million to a million subscribers by the end of next year.

Glenn: That's good, that's a fairly modest direction right, and that's already hundreds of millions of minutes that would be migrated from one service to another.

Steve: Absolutely. I mean it doesn't sound like all that much when you think of a billion phones being sold next year, but the reality is to come from ostensibly zero this year to nearly a million is it looks to be very well within our range to do, and I think that the next problem at the end of 2007 is where are the next round of handsets, I think. The operators are going to forward with the two or three handsets that they've got now.

The Nokia model, the Motorola model, the Samsung models, they're going to do the tests and everybody is going to love this thing and it's going to be how many more models can I get behind it, and that's going to be the next bottleneck.

Glenn: Well that's a good problem to have.

Steve: Exactly.

Glenn: So, well I thank you for your time. I've been talking to Steve Shaw, the director of marketing for Kineto Wireless, and this has been podcast #13, recorded on August 1st, 2006. Thanks Steve, thanks for joining us.

Steve: Thank you very much.

Glenn: And this is Glenn Fleishman, the editor of Wi Fi Networking News. [background music fade out]