Wireless broadband: heard it before
Don't get me wrong. I'm enthusiastic about wireless broadband technology. But when we're talking about providers pushing to deploy the technology as soon as possible, we need to be realistic.
Enterprises can't afford to leap blindly onto this bandwagon. Wireless broadband poses significant new challenges not only for providers, but for customers as well. Take something as "simple" as broadband Web access. TCP/IP was not designed with wireless service structures in mind. What makes IP work is significant overhead between nodes, servers, and routing devices. I'm not just talking about fat packets, but about the mandatory management protocols for any TCP/IP connection--ARP, ICMP, and even UDP. All of these IP protocols generate traffic beyond raw data throughput.
That might not be a problem on a closed LAN or even a regulated service backbone, but when you're talking about cell-based data services, you'll be billed for TCP/IP data throughput as well as all management overhead for that connection. Who wants to pay for additional traffic that the provider uses to monitor its network?
CDPD can bill on a flat rate, but cellular-based data service won't follow that model. In a cell-based scenario, data is the same as voice, and carriers will bill accordingly: users will be charged for all bandwidth their data connection requires--regardless of whether it's actually carrying data. Especially considering that phone calls will still be the bread-and-butter traffic for most cell carriers for the foreseeable future, anything that takes bandwidth away from that is going to be expensive.
Then there's convergence. Lots of promises are being floated about the imminence of converged devices. No, I'm not talking about those ridiculous-looking PDA phone bricks. I'm talking about single devices capable of interacting with a wireless broadband service as well as a local WLAN. In local WLANs this is called roaming, which means you can move seamlessly between subnets. But if we extend this to roaming between local and broadband networks, you'll need not only network roaming, but application-layer roaming as well. Not only will this require some sort of middleware layer that improves the intelligence of network applications designed for only one network, you'll also need help roaming between wireless WANs and WLANs without losing your identity--something that hasn't been fully solved for 802.11, let alone 3G or GSM.
And what makes me feel even less warm and fuzzy is that all these problems are being addressed by telcos: the same companies that are dropping like flies or ducking from accounting flak; the same companies that still can't keep my T1 lines running without at least one glitch every three months; the same companies that did me the favor of charging a "discovery" fee because they couldn't remember if they'd installed dark fiber--and just thought they'd enter my site and check. All this, and I haven't even touched security, which is still pretty much non-existent.
The bottom line is that wireless broadband has a very long way to go before it's viable as an enterprise application extension. This may be unwelcome news for the economy, but telecom providers have burned too many customers to expect anything but caution now.
Do you plan to be on the vanguard of wireless broadband? TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.