Indoor 802.11b to be delicensed in IndiaBy Arun Mehta, Published: Spider, August 2002, On
June 21, the Financial Express carried a statement from India’s IT
Minister, Mr. Pramod Mahajan, that the indoor use of 802.11b and
Bluetooth had been delicensed. Given our wily “Yes, Minister”
bureaucrats, the devil is always found in the detail, so it may be
premature to rejoice until the necessary guidelines by the Department of
Telecommunications are issued, and ten days later,
http://www.dotindia.com is still silent on the subject. But rejoice I
shall.Firstly
I rejoice, because this announcement potentially removes two exciting
wireless technologies from the clutches of government. Wireless, as
everyone knows, is the fastest deployed, scalable, robust technology for
bringing broadband communications access to people, particularly when
they are mobile. Yet all over South Asia, wireless has been only very
grudgingly made available for any kind of community use, much like the
space in the tent for the nose of the camel. With this announcement, the
camel has definitely brought in his foot, and I rejoice even more, that
there is no stopping it now.Free outdoor broadband wirelessSo
far, the announcement only speaks of indoor use of these technologies,
but on India-gii, which is a mailing list that critically tracks India’s
bumpy progress on the information highway, people feel that the
delicensing of outdoor usage is only months away. While Bluetooth isn’t
really powerful enough for outdoor use, 802 technologies work at
distances of several kilometers. This ability of 802 is what makes this
announcement a significant step for the camel: once people start
bringing in and deploying 802 technology for indoor use, of course they
will use it outdoors too. But what will they do with it? Several things.
The
most common means of accessing the Internet, dial-up, is a fragile,
fixed, low-bandwidth (~20Kbits/sec effective) connection, for which the
user pays local call charges on an ongoing basis, in addition to the
ISP's charges for international bandwidth. Even for the single user,
dial-up isn't fast enough when it comes to modern Internet services such
as streaming audio and video. For large users, such as educational
institutions, NGOs, banks and corporates, dial-up is hopelessly
inadequate. In addition, dial-up requires the availability of a good
quality phone line, which is a serious limiting factor when connectivity
is to be brought to rural areas.It
is now possible and legal in India to use 802 for wireless
connectivity. This provides bandwidth in the tens of megabits-per-second
range, at a one-time cost in the tens of thousands of rupees per node.
Of course, prices are rapidly falling. Now, how does this help? For one,
people can share bandwidth. This is how Devdas Bhagat explained the
matter on india-gii:"If
residents get together, they can get broadband access pretty cheap...
Assuming that about 750 have computers, if the societies invest in the
piping for a local Ethernet LAN (which comes to Rs 5000 to 7000 per
head), then the cost for getting 2Mbps+2Mbps redundant connections, a
box capable of running full BGP, a couple of proxies, mail, DNS and
static public ip addresses comes to about Rs 3500/head/yr. " The whole
group has excellent Internet access round the clock for peanuts. Far
more potentially significant is the fact that once the number of people
using 802 outdoors increases beyond the hundreds, we can build a cloud
of high-bandwidth, free of cost communications in any populated area.
Just imagine – free of cost video conferencing within every city. A slum
kid could, walking into a kiosk or school, show his rash to a
specialist doctor, or seek legal or psychological help. If a teacher
were absent, someone from a nearby school could take his class in
addition to her own.Compatibility You
might ask how 802 fits in with 2.5 and 3G, wireless technologies both?
My response would be to argue that I don’t care how bandwidth reaches
me, I definitely want to take more than a close look at whichever
reaches me first. 3G promises me, “next year,” less bandwidth than what
802 delivers today. Another important criterion for me would be
compatibility – I certainly don’t want a plethora of incompatible
standards in use. The US wireless industry suffered because of the
higher level of standardization available to European competitors. This
is also the time when the next generation of wireless networks is being
rolled out, and according to me, a winner is clearly emerging in the
802 family. Why? Because it is already here, and the technology is
simply Ethernet in the air, so it is totally compatible with the
Internet.
But will this camel throw out everyone else from under the wireless tent? For
now, the others cannot be counted out. Big companies have heavily
promoted both Bluetooth and 3G. While Bluetooth was supposed to cater to
the low-cost, short-range market, 3G sought to bring video-level
capabilities to the mobile phone. Neither have been deployed in any
significant numbers, though both are showing signs of finally arriving.Bluetooth
needed numbers to attain the economies of scale to become a low-cost
technology. Those numbers are coming too slow and possibly too late.
Both, Bluetooth and 3G took long to come to market, because the
companies controlling the standard chose to write software afresh for
these new systems, instead of simply adopting the suite of robust
software that effortlessly runs the Internet. Completely
unsung, following the grapevine of the Internet, a new communications
paradigm began to take hold. It wasn't even properly christened. Much
too late, marketing came up with Wi-Fi, but long before then, the
engineers had cheerfully been using the IEEE number that defined the
standard - 802.11b. Such
interconnectivity costs less than a hundred dollars a node, routinely
carries traffic in excess of six megabits per second, traverses
kilometers with line of sight, uses off-the-shelf hardware and software.
Because it simply transports TCP-IP and the Internet into the air, it
doesn't need a central server. In the event of a disaster, the surviving
nodes automatically reconnect, unlike conventional telecommunications
networks, which have consistently let us down in natural disasters such
as Latur, Orissa and Bhuj. In
802.11b, the individual invests one-time in the networking hardware,
which depending on distance and the presence of other 802.11b nodes,
costs between $40 and $1000. Networks as small as 2 nodes are
commonplace. Often these are within a room, for the economies of scale
that Bluetooth didn't find, 802.11b reached by simply extending the
wired Ethernet LAN into the air. It also, significantly, allowed
cost-effective broadband connectivity over distances. Single hops in the
range of several kilometers are easily attainable, with multiple hops
extending the range without limit. Through this ability, 802.11b
delivers today what 3G promises in a few years. nocat.net/faq.txt is an excellent beginners' guide to 802.11b (the numbers they mention are behind the times, though).Rapid
deployment of telecom is a high priority in South Asia. Much optic
fiber has been deployed, but of these rivers of bandwidth, very little
reaches even the large end-user. We now have a tried and tested
technical solution to this problem. Managers who take funding decisions
will find it much more attractive to fund low, one-time costs, than the
high running expenses the current model entails. The emergence of a
standard allows them to focus limited resources in capital and training.
Models of deployment One
way of analyzing the ways in which 802.11b has been deployed around the
world, is to divide them into Intranet and Internet models. In the
Intranet model, a hospital, hotel, school, airport might use it as a
means of providing connectivity to its clients or employees. Multiple
nearby offices of a large organization may use it to cut down
interconnection charges, or share a fat pipe to the Internet.There
is, however, the far more exciting community model. In New York
(http://www.nycwireless.net), London (http://consume.net/), Chicago
(http://chicago.freenets.org/), Prague (http://czfree.net/) and many
other cities (www.freenetworks.org, www.wirelessanarchy.com,
http://www.sputnik.com/), anyone in the given geographical area can
share communication bandwidth by simply procuring a little networking
hardware. Besides working well in cities, this model is ideally suited
to interconnecting villages. While
at the time of writing, 802.11b devices seem to be more economical, and
available in greater variety, 802.11a is making rapid strides, and
because of its higher bandwidth, may be considered instead, at the time
you purchase.Where
an NGO, local self-help group or panchayat is interested in a low-cost
means of bringing a village into the global electronic mainstream, one
that will bring it telemedicine and distance learning, along with other
ways of improving the quality of life of the people, broadband wireless
networks based on 802 technology seem like a good starting point.
Organisations and individuals, that have been driven mad by the
limitations of dial-up, will like it too.
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