Time for a service provider to manage your WLAN?

Or will wireless connectivity always depend on you doing a bit of DIY?

You wouldn't want to rely on working above a Starbucks for managed WLAN connectivity. So, asks Simon Marshall, how can service providers help you? You've heard all about public wireless LAN (PWLAN) access – and may even be a regular hotel or airport hotspot user – but whatever happened to the wire-free office? Well, it looks like you may be better off building and managing your own because if you want your telecoms service provider to support your first tentative steps by offering a managed WLAN (MWLAN) service, you're in for a long wait. At least, that's the impression UK enterprises must be getting from the lack of commercial MWLAN services and the apparent lack, even, of promising MWLAN noises from the service providers. In fact, if you want a MWLAN today, your RFI will, for once, be a piece of cake because the only option is BT. If you ask anyone else, mobile operators included, you're likely to get static. That's a shame because chances are that having tasted the freedom WLAN access gives at the hotel or airport you're probably intrigued to see what it can offer your business. "WLAN is certainly emerging and there's a lot of potential value from bundling the technology with services that is exciting to businesses out there," says Pierre Danon, BT Retail CEO. "But to be honest, there's been a bit of hype and so when I was the first one to launch it a year ago, no one was interested. Now, it's the opposite." His opinion - that MWLANs will first be used by enterprises to support wire-free internet access for on-site visitors - suggests its value will be intangible. This hasn’t stopped Colt going ahead recently with a project to upgrade its London HQ for WLAN. But there's no reason, in theory, why large corporates shouldn’t go the whole hog and outsource their private WLAN to their service provider. If only their service provider agreed. In the UK, Energis currently has no public plans to provide MWLAN and Cable & Wireless has only provided it on a custom basis as part of two university projects. It is perhaps understandably reticent while it goes through a major corporate restructuring but aside from BT, seemingly the only other vocal major telco is Colt. "We want to be able to bundle MWLAN into our internet access products," says Daryl Szebesta, director of Colt's Data Services and Systems Outsourcing unit. "One option we are investigating is [launching] MWLAN later this year, because customers are outsourcing more and more of their systems and that now includes WLAN," he says. Of the mobile operators, Orange says it is "actively monitoring" the MWLAN market as part of migrating its customers to 3G, and T-Mobile has PWLAN hotspots set up in a well-known partnership with Starbucks. O2 and Vodafone look to be hedging their bets, in some countries at least. "We are not offering MWLAN as a group-wide approach at the moment but we haven't made any decisions," explains a Vodafone UK spokesman. "As a mobile operator, we already have a [wire-free] network for corporate clients and we will have a 3G network soon that will do the same thing as WLAN." Although it looks like cannibalising existing services is the main public stumbling block for mobile operators, many of them will privately be assessing how to combine Wi-Fi and cellular effectively. After all, they still want to give valuable enterprise data customers choice, as do the fixed line telcos. Here, Colt in particular is developing a GPRS service to compete with the mobile operators, and says the incremental cost of upgrading corporate bandwidth to buildings for MWLAN where it already provides a fixed link is minimal. "We also have a big opportunity from customers whose users are currently travelling around Europe and using fixed line dial-up, which is expensive and slow," says Moray Barclay, the manager of Colt's Mobility Programme. "They are interested in better ways to get back into their corporate network, and MWLAN is one of them." In most cases, this means they will be using a laptop IP VPN client that encrypts data for transmission over the public internet, offering a measure of data integrity, if not the ultimate in wireless security. BT's Danon adds: "We [telcos] need to be better about how we communicate on security because I'd say that the security issue is behind us but I'm still seeing a lot of corporates that are sensitive about it." In fact, it's likely that this sensitivity will translate into enterprises specifying that their service provider become responsible for the security of their M-WLAN. And that's going to be tough to implement or measure. AT&T has just announced it will offer MWLAN throughout Europe during 2004, a deadline that might make its UK counterparts look flat-footed. Nevertheless, AT&T's approach highlights the importance of offering a MWLAN service that's easy to use and bill for. "Our focus in Europe is on enhancing the customer experience," says Justin Simms, senior VP of AT&T's Global Services division, a man not without ambition. "The plan is to take hotspot capacity, bundle it together with our remote access products and then integrate it with our own client software, a single helpdesk and a single bill." This last part is crucial in providing an integrated, managed service for both private and public WLANs. Not many users will relish one bill for private access and the prospect of buying a scratchcard for every PWLAN session. On the whole, this means any service provider looking to play seriously in the MWLAN market - if there ever is one - will need plenty of partnerships in place to guarantee ubiquity of access for roaming users. However, the gravitas of AT&T's proposal illustrates that MWLAN should eventually be making its way onto enterprise laptops either as a profitable standalone or bundled service, or a strategic offering to improve customer loyalty. "The [incumbent] telcos have a lot of money and patience and so they can proceed at whatever pace they choose," explains David Chamberlain, research director for Wireless Services and Networks at Probe Research. While he's not certain whether MWLAN is a margin or a strategic play for the service providers, he says "there's a desire to own the customer and provide it all". They have their work cut out for them. "The real challenge for them is to find a way to provide a service that is not what they have traditionally been able to provide," he explains. Businesses that in the meantime find that bit of news depressing must apparently either ask for help from a systems integrator, speak to BT or do it themselves.