 | March 1, 2000 |
Wireless wars
Wireless LANs go beyond local spaces
As is evident from the cover story in our March issue ("Up for grabs"), wireless Internet and wireless LAN are hot topics (also see "Hearth and LAN," Jan 2000). At least two organizations see wireless LAN technology as the key to providing wireless Internet access in public places such as airports, hotels, and convention centers.
MobileStar is already installing its service, based on Proxim's wireless LAN technology, in select locations. Now Lucent Technologies is launching a broad wireless-LAN initiative branded Orinoco (for the trivia-conscious, the name refers to a river in Venezuela).
Lucent's vision calls for wireless LANs in locations public, commercial, and private. A mobile user with a notebook computer could access a wireless connection at home, in the office, and in communal places using a single network-interface card.
Orinoco will rely on both the IEEE-802.11b standard for 11-Mbit/sec direct-sequence spread-spectrum LANs and on interoperability testing and standardization being handled by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA, www.wirelessethernet.org). Products introduced so far include the Orinoco PC Card, the RG 1000 Residential Gateway (pictured), the AP 1000 Access Point for office applications, and the AS series Access Server family of products for public Internet-access applications.
Lucent is enlisting regional and national ISPs to spread the service. Thus Lucent expects to blanket the nation's public areas faster than MobileStar, which is taking a solo approach. Orinoco's higher performance (11 Mbits/sec, compared to MobileStar's 2) directly translates into the ability to support more users. And users won't necessarily have to buy Lucent PC Cards to access Orinoco-based LANs; any card carrying WECA's WI-FI (Wireless Fidelity) trademark should work.
Still, MobileStar could prove formidable. The service is already available in some places, and Proxim and MobileStar are pushing the FCC to change the regulations for frequency-hopping spread-spectrum radios, which would let them boost data rates to the 10-Mbit/sec range.
—by Maury Wright
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