With many companies now substituting WiFi for wired networks, it's natural that those with multiple locations would want to tie them all together.
Bluesocket Inc. of Burlington, Mass. (right, from their home page) is among those getting into this game. Their home page describes them as "building an enterprise-class WLAN" and they claim their new WG-400 Wireless Gateway can handle as many as 50 users at the same time, which is pretty nifty.
But is there a general problem here? Perhaps there is.
The law of unlicensed frequencies is that anyone can use them. The practice of wireless LAN installation is that the owner of the real estate controls the frequency. The law of unintended consequences is that when there's a potential conflict out there, you can bet it will turn up somewhere.
This has yet to be tested because, despite the hype, the low power of 802.11 radios means there's little interference. Problems have occurred when Wireless ISPs tried to use 802.11 as a long-distance tool, with directional antennas cutting over property lines to link customers to a network. But that is a job for Wi-Max, and when that equipment is substituted the problem dissipates.
Problems will occur, however, when two adjacent shops, or two adjacent offices, start using 802.11 networking. Radio waves don't respect property lines. A worker in the corner of one office may find herself on the network of a neighbor, unless people are careful and judicious.
What do you do when you're within reach of multiple 802.11 networks? Certainly you can secure both, so access is only granted to the one you're a member of. But the presence of the interference limits the speed available to anyone near the boundary.
What is going to happen, unfortunately, is that Company B will install a WLAN, find that Company A is already using the frequency, and feel moved to sue for access to it. The law says both must have access. But then Company C installs one, and the contention robs everyone of bandwidth. What then?
I think there's a great opportunity here for what I would call "wireless arbitrators," technical experts who can craft solutions to contention that combine negotiated settlements among the parties and the best available solutions for keeping 802.11 radio waves penned-up where they belong.
(I looked everywhere for a good illustration of the word arbitrator, but the best I could come up with is at left, a cat called Madame Nu's Arbitrator of Pudikatz. He's a seal point Himalayan.)
The problem is, what is the arbitrator's business model? It's not in the interest of either side's lawyer to go to him. But it is in the interests of the parties. It may be up to the legal system to create this profession.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jesse Kopelman on December 10, 2004 03:56 PM writes...
You propose a human oriented solution with your arbitrators. The alternative is human independant solutions. One solution (which I know you like) is adding cognitive functions to the 802.11 networks to allow them to minimize instances of interference by adjusting channel and power level based on observed conditions. Another is switching to WiMax. With its TDMA MAC and all OFDM PHY, WiMax will be more resistant to interference in the situation you picture. A very low tech solution is to use vanilla WiFi, but to change your network topology to use many low-power APs vs. few high-power (Aruba Networks has championed this approach). By curtailing the service area of each AP, contention and interference problems become much less of an issue. The idea of controlling serving area is fundamental to "cellular" networks regardless of technology, but sadly no one other than engineers seem to grasp the concept.
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