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"Cellular providers are trying to destroy us" - WiFi lobbyists say

At the Cellular Telephone & Internet Association (CTIA) show in Orlando this week the message to the WiFi Cowboys was that they should head for the hills. Cellular providers can't compete, so they will try to legislate them out of the way.

Before the show opened WiFi analyst Alan Reiter was given a room by uber-analyst Andy Seybold to explain and defend 802.11. He did his best, but only a few people heard him.

Seybold's room, on the other hand, was packed with executives flipping pages of his presentation looking for a recovery. Their infrastructure costs, along with declining customer counts and brutal price competition, have some of them wondering if they'll have a business by the time the show comes back in a year. They were praying for money to rain from the sky.

That money, Seybold said, will come from data revenues. It will come from taking the market of the Wi-Fi Cowboys for slower, but licensed, services like Bluetooth, GPRS, and 1XRTT.

Reiter was also given his own plenary session, although Seybold's acolytes had mostly departed. Here Sky Dayton of Boingo tried to defend his pricing and Jim Thompson of Musenki admitted the only real security solution for a Wi-Fi user in a Boingo hotspot is a link to a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

The panel agreed, however, that WiFi "will impact the 3G business case." Unanswered was the question of why cellular companies shouldn't work to stomp the WiFi boys flat when they're not paying for spectrum the cellular outfits paid billions for (and now can't fully exploit because their money is tied up).

The answer, it turned out, is they are. The cowboys were hit hard last week by a petition from Sirius , a satellite radio operator whose licensed spectrum starts 55 MHz south of the 2.4 MHz WiFi corridor, which would force them to cut the power on all 802.11b devices by one-third so as to avoid interference.

"This will destroy us," according to 802.11b advocate Glenn Fleishman, who called it "Siriusly Twisted." . "We have to fight this, to stop this."

Well, Glenn, the FCC is going to approve the petition. This became crystal clear later the same day at the launch of the CTIA's "Wireless Internet Caucus," yet-another attempt to get the U.S. industry on the same page for data networking.

The industry, you see, now has its own FCC commissioner, former AirTouch and US West lawyer Kathleen Abernathy . She spoke at the WIC launch about the "power of three" – she's the third vote on the commission and figures that 3 competitors make a competitive market. Thus the thousands of ISPs who now rely on DSL or cable for access to their customers should just go away.

Wireless is the third competitor, but only on licensed frequencies. While Abernathy promised to auction vast new stretches of spectrum the industry can't afford, her main message was that wireless competitors must "not interfere" with one another, she said. If there's even the threat of interference the interests of license-holders come first. This means the 2.4 GHz WiFi Cowboys have serious trouble.

Or maybe they should, as I said, just head for the hills, in this case the greener pastures of the two 5 MHz frequency bands used for 802.11a. As I sipped a martini and pondered Abernathy's words at a press party dubbed "Mobile Focus" I walked into the stand of an engineer with Atheros Communications, an 802.11 chipmaker, who said this is not a bad thing.

There's a lot more spectrum up there. Di-poling the antenna (instead of using a single stick) will, at these frequencies, give you nearly the same range as at 2.4 GHz. And the adjacent licence-holders are friendly, he observed. Both European and American companies have plenty of room to play in these new unlicenced bands, and the chip industry is ready to help them do that.

Atheros is just a chip-maker, of course. But its stuff goes into plenty of products from folks like Proxim, NetGear, SMC, even Intel. A full range of products for commercial WiFi that implements Atheros' latest features will come out this fall.

So git along little doggies.

Dana Blankenhorn is a special correspondent for The Newswireless Net. He runs his own Internet newsletter at A-Clue.com providing clues for the clued-up.