Features

Rockman comment: "BT won't be able to make mobility work."

Not everybody shares the excitement that WiFi enthusiasts felt when BT announced it was going to set up "hotspot" access to the Internet. Simon Rockman, Publisher of "What Mobile?" magazine, thinks BT's new mobility pitch is hollow: BT's new mobility pitch is hollow. It sounds coherent and sensible as an initial proposition - but then you have to look at who is doing the work. A company which has consistently been underwhelming with its competence. A company which took two years to do an ADSL roll out that it predicted would take six months.

There are two particularly weak parts of the strategy which is aimed at giving high speed corporate access. The first is dealing with mmo2.

The company which was BT Cellnet has no high speed strategy. From a leadership position in GPRS it now has the smallest number of users (WAP-only users don't and don't count). The company hasn't gone for HSCSD and will not offer the EDGE technology which triples GPRS speeds.

The O2 argument for not going for EDGE is that 3G will be along soon. It won't partly because O2 isn't prepared to make the kind of investment that Hutch 3G has been making. Indeed O2 has said that it will delay 3G rollout until there is a business case for it.

So that leaves BT Mobility with a technology which, for the most part has an upload speed of either 9.6kbps or - best possible case, with limited choice of hardware - 26kbps. Download speeds are up to around 50kbps (again with limited choice of hardware and only under ideal conditions) or, more generally 9.6kbps.

The ‘solution' to this is 802.11. It's Rabbit for mobile data. 802.11 is fine if you are a BT employee who happens to work in a building with a hot spot. Indeed BT gives figures for how huge a population a few hot spots can serve. This is hokum. 802.11 has a range of 10m. A GSM cell has a range of over 17km. To give the coverage of one GSM you'd need 30,000 hot spots.

In practice GSM cells are smaller but you are still looking at 10,000 hot spots. Each UK network has about 8,000 cells (Orange has more, BT Cellnet fewer). To provide the same level of coverage you'd need a hot spot for every household in the UK. BT Mobility talks about hand-off between GSM and 802.11, but then BT also talked about hand-off between DECT and GSM and that never happened.

There is a place for 802.11, but it's not in public access networks. Apart from the fact that it is illegal to charge for 2.4GHz use – BT expects this to change – it just doesn't have the range. In the US where people are used to being outside cellular coverage, and where internet use is higher there is a place for the technology but for us the sensible option is better GSM, and for that you need to look at Orange.

Read more of Rockman's output at What Mobile's web site.