Wireless strategies: Making the right move

The wireless stumbling blocks keep mounting. Despite healthy enterprise adoption, hurdles are holding wireless technologies back from their ultimate end game: ubiquitous access to enterprise data, applications and services.

The list of troubles is not small. Competing Wi-Fi standards, complex wireless LAN infrastructures, spectrum and capacity limitations, security problems, QoS (quality of service), billing issues, and shortage of Wi-Fi hotspots all stand as unresolved roadblocks.

As the wireless buzz escalates, vendors are paying scant attention to helping enterprises navigate a vast array of point solutions, though doing so would create more efficient business processes, improve communications, and allow customers to make decisions based on real-time data.

As Joe Damassa, vice president of marketing for Pervasive Computing at IBM in Somers, N.Y., observes, no one silver bullet can offer a unified wireless architecture. “Wireless implementation is all about what business problem you are trying to solve, and that dictates the technology,” Damassa says.

“The enterprise has the same set of issues [with wireless that] they faced when deploying Web sites and e-commerce systems… They were not tied into the back-end systems,” Damassa argues.

But even striving for back-end connections has its own problems. “A company can easily fall into the trap that everything ought to be in real-time, but in practicality, that is not the way most business works,” says Al Kurtze, director and chief strategist of telecom media networks at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in New York, NY.

“It is one thing to establish real-time communications wirelessly with the back end, but if you don’t post your real-time data, you have not added a lot to the salesman who just walked through the door of a customer,” Kurtze says.

Before companies can achieve this state of unified back-end bliss, a series of protocol and spectrum issues must be resolved to shore up the availability of wireless services.

Wi-FiWorries

One issue still percolating: the 802.11 standard, also known as Wi-Fi, and its many flavors, including 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g.

In January, the IEEE approved yet another standard, 802.16a, for wireless MANs (metropolitan area networks). Designed primarily as a backbone wireless standard, 802.16 provides connectivity from base stations to clusters of 802.11b networks. Yet some speculate that the technology can replace 802.11b itself. If it catches on, 802.16a – with a range of up to 31 miles and peak shared-data rate of 70Mbps –could extend the reach of wireless LANs (WLANs) far beyond the traditional range of up to 300 feet (see p.54, “802.16a Pushes the Limit”).

When it comes to evaluating Wi-Fi bandwidth, 802.11g appears to be the best choice, offering access speeds of 54Mbps. It’s also backward compatible with 802.11b and .11a systems running at 11Mbps.

Yet by the same token, 802.11a – which offers 13 useable channels rather than the three channels offered by .11b or .11g — has strong support. For example, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based wireless vendor Proxim is upgrading its largest customers to devices supporting 802.11a rather than 802.11g. “The more experienced enterprise customers are more interested in .11a than in .11g,” Proxim’s VP of Marketing Lynn Lucas says.

Proxim devices are used in most of the world’s stock exchanges, where they permit an extremely dense set of channels to operate in a limited space. The company has tied the management of its Orinoco Wi-Fi gateway and access points (APs) to its Tsunami outdoor MAN.

Proxim’s example builds on work being done by wireless LAN management vendors to embed intelligence from each AP into a central switch or router.

Holtsville, N.Y.-based Symbol Technologies took a similar tack with its Axion Wireless Switch, which adds centralized control to a WLAN solution. In creating the switch, Symbol designed low-cost access ports that require far less silicon than access points do. The switch centralizes network access, security, and policy management and adds QoS capabilities. In addition, it uses a Linux-based OS that should give most administrators the ability to add features easily.

Many vendors have followed up on Symbol’s pioneering centralized-management concept with network devices of their own. “Symbol’s Axion is just a wireless LAN switch. [Our] Beacon Master and Beacon Points is a router and it is in a deeper part of the network. As customers have told us, ‘the last thing I want do is screw around with a switch in my wiring closet,” says Bob Meyers, CTO at Boston-based Chantry Networks.

Chantry’s answer has been to centralize the management of both wired and wireless networks. Not content to do this at the switch level, Chantry brings wireless and wired together at L3 (Layer 3) with a router technology it calls Beacon Master. The APs are wired to the IP network and are then routed to the Beacon Master, which is complementary to a Cisco router. “Routers allow access points wherever your IP network goes. It gives IT the freedom of placing APs wherever your people need them,” Meyers says.

Proxim is developing yet another centralized management tool under the product name Maestro, a switch-based architecture that offers management capabilities similar to those found in the Symbol Axion switch. Yet these WLAN vendors are working without a set of standards to guarantee the interoperability of competing offerings.

Security woes

Security has long been a concern for companies implementing Wi-Fi. The bombshell came when it became known that static WEP keys, the standard encryption built into Wi-Fi, were easily broken by hackers.

The first step the Wi-Fi Alliance took to secure wireless traffic was developing its Wi-Fi Protected Access [WPA] standard. The WPA selected specific elements of a larger IEEE 802.11i security standard, which has not yet been approved, and used them to carve out the interim WPA standard.

This seemed to mollify most corporate IT. But Dennis Eaton, chairman of the Wi-Fi Alliance, warns that when the full .11i standard is finally approved, the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) technology which Eaton calls “a state-of-the-art encryption cipher” will not be backward compatible with current hardware.

As a result, companies will need to acquire new Wi-Fi access cards for client and new access points for 802.11i. “Ideally, you need a hardware co-processor to support AES. In the computer the processor might do it,” Eaton says.

All the security technology in the world won’t help, however, if you can’t get access to the network. Lingering capacity and spectrum issues continue to call into question carriers’ ability to deliver reliable services over public wireless networks.

As it stands, carriers are still dealing with the evolution from 2.5G to full 3G capabilities. GSM networks are in the midst of transitioning to GPRS, with the ultimate goal of morphing into 3G CDMA.

Carriers in blame the lack of available wireless spectrum for patchy networks, or so-called wireless black holes.

The problem can be traced, in part, to NextWave Telecom. Back in the mid-1990s, the company won a $4 billion bid for a large chunk of spectrum. NextWave has since gone under, but even after courtroom wrangling, the FCC still cannot reclaim this band of 700MHz spectrum for resale to other wireless operators.

There is now a “sizeable chunk of fallow spectrum” unavailable to operators seeking to deliver the type of QoS required for reliable enterprise wireless networks, says Travis Larsen, a spokesperson for the CTIA.

That’s good news for companies building out Wi-Fi networks, or hotspots, based on widely available unlicensed spectrum. For instance, Cometa Networks — a joint venture of AT&T, IBM and Intel — plans to capture enterprise business with a national Wi-Fi network, building its infrastructure on the back of major carrier backbones. Unfortunately, the business case for making Wi-Fi hotspots part of a larger enterprise solution is iffy.

Larry Brilliant, interim CEO at Cometa, describes a revenue sharing scheme that seems Rube Goldbergesque in its complexity. On one hand, Cometa resells its hotspot service to other carriers, while separately offering its own services to the enterprise. IBM Global Services manages the network, AT&T provides the backhaul, and Intel provides the Wi-Fi technology.

Next, revenue is shared with host retailers based on how many customers accessed the network while in their location. Finally, in order to deliver the kind of coverage promised — a two minute walk to any hotspot in any of 50 major metro areas – Cometa must also sign on with Wi-Fi aggregators. In most cases, these are shaky startups that allow users to sign up with multiple hotspot providers.

The picture suggests technologist will have a difficult time delivering employees reliable coverage away from the office for some time to come. Add to this the difficulty of integrated billing between Wi-Fi and WANs, and the picture is not pretty.

Carriers are not being very proactive about resolving these issues, says Ken Dulaney an analyst at Gartner in San Jose, Calif. “The carriers don’t have formal plans for Wi-Fi. They are letting it happen and waiting and watching,” he says.

Emerging Answers

Yet despite the challenges, a number of solutions are emerging. Industry experts, for example, are frantically working toward the Holy Grail of connectivity: seamless roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Under this model, carriers can offload busy circuits in congested areas like airports, hotels and convention centers to Wi-Fi hotspots.

A technology that would automatically switch a user from the public cellular to private WLAN network promises huge cost savings in scenarios where employees use cell phones inside the corporate campus despite the availability of cheaper fixed lines. “That gets expensive, and IT doesn’t see it,” Proxim’s Lucas says.

Motorola, Avaya, and Proxim announced in April a three-way partnership to address the issue. By mid-2004 the partners are expected to ship a cellular handset that can seamlessly roam between the two networks.

Motorola will provide the handsets; Avaya, a leading company in voice and PBX systems, will provide call management and the technology that will tie the solution to the PBX; and Proxim will provide its Maestro management solution for the WLAN part of the puzzle.

Colubris Networks, a WLAN infrastructure company based in Laval, Canada, is also pursuing the seamless-roaming goal.

“You will sit in the back of taxi and use your GPRS [General Packet Radio Service] phone to start downloading or uploading a document. When you get to the airport, you can go to the lounge with Wi-Fi capabilities, and the module will sense a faster network, roam you without a new log in, and the IP sessions are not lost,” says Pierre Trudeau, CTO and founder of Colubris.

The technologies will extend existing options for seamless roaming, such as dual-mode communications cards. Nokia has one such example, the D3, which incorporates GPRS and IEEE 802.11b in a single card. But it is not capable of seamless roaming between the two networks. Using a soft button on the screen, users select their preferred network.

Cap Gemini’s Kurtze says the technology holds promise. Carriers are just waiting for enough applications to generate demand for the services.

For some companies, like Honolulu-based Hawaii Home Loans (HHL), the solution is partnering closely with a service provider. HHL went 100-percent wireless last year, using Sprint phones for voice, Sprint wireless PCS Connection cards in laptops for data, and Wi-Fi to provide connectivity in the office.

HHL loan officers use wireless to process paperwork, access credit reports, and obtain loan approvals right in the customer’s home or office.

“It is very cool and productive to see our [loan] officers regularly walking about the office with their laptops, working on problems together, and coming to meetings with their laptops. They are always working,” says Leonard Loventhal, senior vice president at HHL and the executive who oversaw the company’s wireless overhaul.

Sprint was willing support the move by directing a second antenna at HHL’s headquarters to increase coverage and reduce dropped calls.

“When you get 50 cell phones all going at once in a small radius it does lead to some coverage issues,” Loventhal admits. “We do have dropped calls in data sessions.”

“But the trade-off is worth it. 3G is fast enough, and when customers watch us do loan underwriting through the network, it definitely gives us a competitive edge.”

It seems Sprint executives are also counting on new customers evaluating what QoS they are prepared to accept to gain the benefits of wireless networks.

“If [QoS] is important enough and the ROI is good enough, then they may still go with [cellular], even at 2 percent downtime,” says Phil Bowman, vice president of business marketing at Sprint’s PCS Division in Overland Park, Kan.

Another set of solutions now coming of age are traditional middleware offerings like IBMsWebSphere, BEA’sWebLogic, or Sun Microsystem’s Sun ONE Application Server. These integration suites enable companies to push enterprise applications out to a variety of device types, from Palms to Pocket PCs. According to IBM’s Damassa, these integration suites are evolving to manage individual user demands for company data, based on real-time access needs and connectivity requirements.

As these products evolve, John Jordan, CTO at Cap Gemini, the first step for technologists is changing their outlook on wireless’ impact on their company.

“Start to think of your asset base as anything that moves in the computational node [rather than] the stuff that stands still and [are] called computers,” he says.