Whole cities are preparing to go wireless, with London
and Manchester leading the way in the UK. The promise of wireless
technology means remote workers can continue to be productive for
the business away from the office and effectively hotdesk from a
satellite office, train or cafe.
Behind the scenes a web of technologies is evolving to take the
strain of increasing volumes of mobile data traffic. For the IT
manager, it is becoming more important to support the
latest standards and also to increase the
security of users' computers as they travel.
In October 2006, most of the
City of
London went live with a wireless Wi-Fi network that gave
workers and visitors access to the internet in the streets and open
spaces across the Square Mile. Wi-Fi network operator
The Cloud
installed the network for the City of London. This follows the
successful implementation of Wi-Fi access points across London's
Canary Wharf.
The Cloud carried out a similar operation in Manchester in July
2006, making Manchester the first of many cities to have a
city-centre broadband wireless network.
The Manchester network allows users in the city centre to access
the internet using Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
The London and Manchester networks are run partly by The Cloud
and partly by BT.
Separately, BT signed deals with 12 councils to give a dozen UK
cities widespread Wi-Fi coverage. BT will fit Wi-Fi antennae in the
streets to create zones where people can get wireless access to the
internet. BT aims to have the first six cities live this year.
The Cloud has a flat rate package of unlimited internet access
for £11.99 a month, or a range of pay-as-you-go deals. Users can
also access the wireless network via other suppliers that rent out
The Cloud's network. These service providers include BT Openzone,
O2, SkypeZones, Vonage, iPass and Nintendo Wi-Fi.
Users require a Wi-Fi-equipped laptop, PDA, handheld games
console, or mobile phone to access the service, and they may need
to pay the individual service providers for time on their
networks.
Bobby Sarin, chief operating officer at The Cloud, says,
"Businesses can use wireless broadband to work more efficiently,
local government workers can stay in touch with their office via
handheld devices, and the general public can surf the web, play
Nintendo games and make low-cost calls internationally over the
internet."
The Manchester City Centre project will be followed by
Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham and
Oxford, along with the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea,
Camden and Islington.
As well as The Cloud's wireless broadband service, Manchester
also has a city-wide broadband wireless IP network that is based on
£10m of networking equipment from Atlantic Telecom.
This equipment has been acquired and upgraded by Manchester
Metronet to enable services such as wireless CCTV and disaster
recovery to private and public sector organisations.
Manchester Metronet's network offers speeds of up to 200mbps.
One of the service's first users is Community Security, which
provides around-the-clock monitoring services for property owners
and schools. It is using the Metronet service for high-quality
wireless CCTV.
The Manchester Metronet service has 13 secure radio points on
top of high-rise buildings, which provide coverage to users within
the M60 ring road. The points of presence are linked using a
fault-tolerant fibre optic ring, so network traffic can be rerouted
in an emergency.
Users of the service become part of a wireless local loop, which
is delivered via a carrier-grade radio link. Users can access the
broadband radio link by installing a small radio on the exterior of
their building, which is cabled to their IT department or
monitoring room. Manchester Metronet worked with Manchester City
Council, NCP and Greater Manchester Police to deliver the
service.
Michael Hulme, a professor at Lancaster University's Institute
of Advanced Studies, says the benefits of municipal wireless
broadband for businesses and home workers will be huge. One of the
main benefits will be that workers will gain mobile internet access
with powerful search facilities.
"There will be relatively seamless connections to business
enterprise systems from quite small devices, with fast pipes both
ways, and heavy opportunities for data manipulation and business
intelligence," he says.
Hulme adds that wireless broadband will also enable extensive
use of videoconferencing to allow mobile workers to have a
presence in meetings and also to help cut transport costs.
"The extended wireless network is very powerful because it can
shift a lot of data and run rich video," he says.
Wireless broadband will enable users to store large amounts of
data remotely and potentially use their homes as data storage
nodes. "My mobile device will be uploading and synchronising data,
and this will give systems greater redundancy and make them less
vulnerable to terrorist attack," says Hulme.
Along with mobile access to the internet and business
applications, wireless mobile broadband brings a blurring of the
working day, says Hulme. This will allow employees to work more
flexible hours, which could improve their work/life balance.
In the future, all businesses will have to support mobile
wireless users, says Hulme. "If you are not playing in wireless,
you are probably not going to be playing. Mobility is part of
modern social behaviour. Those who do it are getting competitive
advantage now. They are getting the information where they want
it," he says.
Ian Keene, vice-president at analyst firm Gartner, says the
future for wireless cities and towns is looking good, with most UK
cities and towns planning to support wireless services in 2007 and
2008.
But he says the main business challenge of public wireless
hotspots is their lack of security. "Wireless hotspots are the
hardest things to secure. For corporate users, businesses have to
have a wireless local area network policy in place, and articulate
it for use in the office, home and at hotspots," he says.
Such a policy should involve first using a virtual private
network that can separate corporate data traffic from public
traffic.
Second, roaming employees should use recognised hotspots run by
service providers, and not just wander the streets and link into
any open wireless network they find. However, Keene adds that the
likelihood of a user's machine getting hacked while in a coffee
shop is very slim.
Third, businesses cannot use encryption technologies such as
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) because public networks are open by
nature and rely on users not sending encrypted traffic, says
Keene.
The wireless technology itself is still largely untried, he
adds. Problems include not having sufficiently high coverage across
the cities, mainly because European cities do not follow a grid
formation.
In addition, the maximum output power of UK Wi-Fi equipment is a
tenth of the power allowed in the US, and this could hinder
implementations.
Wi-Fi is also unlicensed, so anyone can set up an access point.
However, the quality of service cannot be guaranteed, nor can there
be any service level agreements because the service provider cannot
control the interference levels.
It is still unclear whether Wi-Fi will be any good for carrying
large volumes of voice traffic, in which case users may opt to
stick with their 3G mobile phones.
Despite these issues, wireless cities are destined to be a
success, says Keene. "Wi-Fi is on a huge percentage of laptops and
PCs, and we are starting to see dual mode mobile and Wi-Fi
handsets. In addition, more than 30% of broadband homes in the UK
now have Wi-Fi," he says.
Wireless broadband technologies
Wi-Fi
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology underlies a wireless local
area network (WLan) and is based on the IEEE 802.11 family of
specifications.
It can be used by a person with a Wi-Fi-enabled device, such as
a laptop, mobile phone or PDA to connect to the internet when in
the proximity of an access point.
The region covered by one or several access points is called a
hotspot. This can range from a single room to many square miles of
overlapping hotspots.
HSDPA
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a mobile phone
technology and an evolution of 3G.
It allows mobile phones to send data at higher data transfer
speeds than before, so that mobile users can access rich content
from their phones and PDAs.
Dual-mode 3G and Wi-Fi phones are available, and software can
hand over data traffic between the two wireless systems. In future
wireless cities, Wi-Fi, Wimax and HSDPA are all likely to be used
alongside each other.
Wimax
Wimax refers to the IEEE 802.16 wireless network standard, just
as Wi-Fi refers to IEEE 802.11.
Wimax is very different from Wi-Fi in the way it works, but it
can be a complementary technology, particularly if it is used in a
mesh network, as the channel that links up Wi-Fi access points.
Many towns and cities are interested in implementing Wimax
technology because it costs less to operate than Wi-Fi.
City of London
gets Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi phone sales
rocketing
Concerns over
hotspot costs
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