Florida State commits to Wi-Fi deployment: four-year effort expands to campus classrooms

The proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots at airports and coffee shops has whet users' appetites for more--and once college students and faculty experience the convenience of wireless bandwidth, it doesn't take long before they begin asking their information technology administrators to install it on campus, too.

Wi-Fi is becoming an important initiative for more and more colleges and universities. And for a large public university such as Florida State in Tallahassee, that undertaking can be similar in scale to that of a municipal deployment. Like other academic institutions implementing Wi-Fi, FSU has faced funding, security and manpower issues--and has found some creative solutions to all three challenges.

INITIAL EXPERMENT

IT personnel at FSU first began experimenting with Wi-Fi about four years ago as a means of connecting several outlying buildings to the campus computer network without having to lay fiber. That experience taught them that they would need to address potential security vulnerabilities before expanding further, says Clint Ringgold, FSU coordinator of computer system control. "We decided to go with a gateway approach to take care of security," Ringgold says.

A year of in-house testing followed. "We required people to log on to the campus network," says Ringgold. "That empowered us to be able to take known user information from the university and if there is a security issue, we can determine the individuals who might have been involved."

Manpower issues also were top of mind. "Part of our solution was that our network had to be able to be run by a very small number of people," Ringgold says. "We have three people in our wireless group taking care of approximately 3,000 total users, including 1,500 on a daily basis." Those numbers continue to climb and could swell to include all 40,000 faculty, staff and students as more and more computers come equipped with Wi-Fi cards.

Network administrators developed several computer screens that would be automatically sent to users when certain situations arose to help the users solve the situation on their own. If users have a virus problem or are consuming too much bandwidth, for example, a screen appears on their computer advising them of the problem.

WI-FI EXPANDS

FSU's IT administrators installed Wi-Fi access points to cover about 75% of outdoor areas and 90% of the library. "We leveraged money that had already been spent," Ringgold says, noting that Wi-Fi's open standards enable the network to support access points from a variety of vendors.

The next goal is to bring Wi-Fi access to more classrooms, only about 2% of which are currently covered. "We're in test mode of finding a way for professors to be able to turn off access during class to make sure they have students' attention," says Ringgold.

The FSU network currently includes 132 access points. Throughout about 60% of the network, users get bandwidth in the range of 3 to 4 megabits per second. The other 40% get between 1 and 3 MBPS, Ringgold says.

Expanding VoIP: wireless apps set to broaden appeal and expand reach of service providers

Now that VoIP technology has gained mainstream mind and market acceptance among many residential and business voice users, service providers and vendors are looking straight on to the next challenge: Wireless VoIP.

Combining the attractive features and pricing of VoIP with the convenience and portability of wireless seems like a natural to many industry adherents, who figure forthcoming Wi-Fi and WiMAX standards will help focus attention, interest and perhaps investment in the converged technology. They see Wi-Fi and then WiMAX-based portable phones supplementing--and perhaps years from now replacing--traditional wired and cellular technology as consumers and businesses opt for portability and, ultimately, true mobility.

However, for now and in the near future, wireless VoIP is taking root primarily in enterprise and small-business accounts as a convenient voice technology that offers limited portability in a campus-like setting. Nevertheless, a variety of vendors and service providers--including well-known technology "disrupters" like Vonage--is waiting in the wings with new product introductions.

WI-FI HANDSETS

"We see a high demand from some customers who just want a wireless device," explains Louis Holder, executive vice president of product development for Vonage, the pioneering VoIP provider that is currently beta-testing a new Wi-Fi handset. Vonage partnered with UTStarcom to develop the phone, which Vonage expects to market before year's end.

"Eventually, wireless VoIP is going to be commonplace," predicts Bill Simmelink, general manager of the VoIP Business Group for Texas Instruments. "The ramp-up is just about to occur." Simmelink adds that TI already is developing about half a dozen wireless VoIP handsets for enterprise applications.

"We are seeing a lot of demand for wireless VoIP services," says Dave Williams, vice president of products, markets and systems with NextWeb, a Fremont, Calif.-based fixed-wireless business ISP. In mid-April, NextWeb launched what it billed as the nation's largest deployment of VoIP services over a pre-WiMAX network. This month it will begin marketing wireless VoIP service to 500,000 small and mid-size businesses in more than 175 cities in California, its main service area.

The fledgling wireless VoIP industry is bracing for many more such service offerings. A recent study from Infonetics Research estimates that Wi-Fi VoIP handset revenue totaled $45 million in 2004 with 113,000 units shipped worldwide. Revenue and units are expected to grow sharply through 2009 as more enterprises deploy voice over wireless LANs (VoWLAN).

CELLULAR DISRUPTION

"Wi-Fi capability will eventually become a common feature in cell phones, just as it is becoming standard in laptops today, giving mobile operators a big opportunity with Wi-Fi voice," predicts Richard Webb, directing analyst for Infonetics and author of the report. He adds that wireless VoIP could end up being "a hugely disruptive technology."

Explains Webb: "The traditional model of time and distance-based pricing for voice calls will be eroded by VoIP, and as VoIP goes wireless, this will present a challenge not only to fixed-line operators, but to mobile operators as well."

Webb and other industry executives concede that a number of issues such as standards, QoS, seamless roaming across different platforms and signal range will have to be resolved before wireless VoIP can really take off. The wait might be surprisingly short. "But with vendors currently working towards standards to address these challenges, it is likely we will be at the foot of the adoption bell-curve by mid-2006," Webb says.

Some U.S. service providers aren't waiting that long.

US Wireless Online, which operates a large Internet wireless broadband network, launched a new VoIP service for the SMB market in Columbus, Ohio in March. The service is expected to roll out to customers in the company's 11-state service area that extends from Pennsylvania to Texas this year. "With business spending on VoIP expected to more than double to $10.9 billion in the U.S. by 2009, we believe our company is well-positioned to capture significant VoIP market share in our growing markets," explains Jai Bhagat, executive chairman of US Wireless Online.

Vonage's Holder believes wireless VoIP will attract a new set of small business customers to Vonage, lured by less expensive calling rates, increased convenience and VoIP's robust functionality that allows for better call management. "A lot of enterprises are talking about Wi-Fi, and the small and midsize business market will be able to get into it without the large capital expense," he says.

However, it is the enterprise user who seems most focused on wireless VoIP at the moment. Roger Sands, vice president of engineering for Colubris Networks, a Campbell, Calif-based WLAN system provider, counts more than 1,000 enterprise and service-provider customers worldwide including Swisscom, Telecom Italia, NTT-ME, Connexion by Boeing and McGill University in Montreal.

Campus triple play

Universities may represent a fertile market for triple play. San Jose State University awarded a bid to provide an IP-based triple-play platform to Iplay3, a consortium composed of NetCentrex, Envivio and Highdeal. Alain Fernando-Santana, Iplay3's managing director, and chief executive officer of NetCentrex, called the deal "a significant market event in that it is one of the first major forays of a university into the triple-play space."

New tools help track wireless roamers: carriers face greater data management challenge

Lucent's recent announcement that it had upgraded its "Super Distributed Home Location Register" wireless customer data management system is serious evidence that wireless roaming is entering a new era--and so must methods of handling the information needed for things like authorizing roaming, determining preferences and billing.

At its 2003 introduction, SDHLR's main function was to consolidate the traditional cellular customer information databases known as home location registers (HLRs). The new version is also compatible with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and other mobile technology. It amounts to an argument by Lucent that any roaming system now has to be ready to handle at least three types of customer roaming databases.

IMS may be the most important of these. Developed under the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), IMS is an ambitious effort aimed at unifying various sorts of mobile IP-based services. Under IMS, users can move easily between applications, perhaps beginning with a voice call then moving to shared Web browsing and then to video conferencing.

These so-called "blended services" can all happen in the same session, without the need to disconnect from one service to use another. Sprint is the first U.S. wireless carrier to have announced plans to implement IMS. At least two European carriers have also done so, with more likely to follow both in the U.S. and around the world (Ericsson claims to have 25 signed contracts to supply IMS equipment).

INCREASED COMPLEXITY

IMS will by itself make the task of handling wireless customer data a lot more complex. But the job gets even more complicated with the addition of another kind of wireless roaming that's in the works: seamlessly moving from cellular service to wireless VoIP via Wi-Fi hot spots using dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi phones.

The problem is in the way the various wireless networks store the customer information. "IMS provides a consistent way to manage profiles and data across multiple network elements," says Von McConnell, director of IMS services at Sprint. Although vendors interpret the IMS architecture differently, its general approach is to put all the relevant customer information and preferences in one database, or set of databases, called the home subscriber server (HSS). And that is crucial to the ability to deliver the blended services.

"If each user profile exists in the specific application and the database associated with that application, and you keep having to do a lookup during the call flow, it becomes very complicated," says Jeff Cortley, Lucent product management director. "The user experience is not very elegant, because you have delay every time you try to move from one service type to another. Having the single subscriber profile database to go to is one of the key enablers, so that you can always go to that one data repository and look up the information about the user and the service."

But while the HSS approach will do the trick for IMS services, conventional 2G or 3G networks store customer data in the traditional HLRs, while Wi-Fi networks use so-called authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) databases. That multiplicity of approaches created the need for Lucent's SDHLR version.

DSL debate heats up for service providers: FCC's BellSouth ruling highlights the issue of why some carriers include voice and others don't

The problem was that the headlines weren't exactly right. True, the FCC's decision invalidated state requirements that BellSouth supply DSL service to users who didn't also buy its phone service. But the ruling wasn't about true "naked" DSL, which travels over lines that carry no voice at all. It was about DSL over UNE, which from a regulatory and perhaps even emotional standpoint is quite different.

Still, from a commercial standpoint, the two are close enough that the entire episode raises an interesting question: Why do some service providers like BellSouth try to avoid delivering DSL without voice, while others go out of their way to do so?

DSL IN DEMAND

Some executives, like Bruce Chatterley, CEO of broadband Internet service provider Speakeasy, think it's a hot business. "The argument historically is that there's a subsidy between voice and data," he says. "But we've been selling DSL [alone] extremely successfully." Speakeasy introduced naked DSL, which it also offers with the option of VoIP phone service, six months ago and already has some 10,000 customers for it, according to Chatterley. In fact, the naked version of DSL "now represents about 70% of our new DSL accounts," he says.

The dispute started when a handful of southern states decided it was anti-competitive of BellSouth to refuse to provide its DSL service to customers who were getting local phone service from its competitors who were leasing the ILEC's copper lines under UNE rules. The states insisted that it provide the service, and in December 2003, BellSouth filed a request for the FCC to preempt the state requirements on several grounds. When the agency ruled in its favor in late March of this year, BellSouth lauded the decision as "clearing out regulatory underbrush" and affirming a single national broadband policy.

So now BellSouth doesn't have to provide standalone DSL of any sort. And the next question is why it wouldn't want to.

BellSouth's argument in its complaint was that the states' actions conflicted with federal rules and authority involving unbundling in general and DSL in particular, and amounted to unlawful regulation of information services. And the FCC's decision in fact found that the state regulations forcing BellSouth to offer DSL over UNE lines were in conflict with federal unbundling rules and policies.

Another factor, according to a spokesman, was that price competition from cable broadband providers made DSL insufficiently profitable to provide without phone service. That doesn't make sense to some observers.

"I'm not sure what was behind BellSouth's pushing this," says Ron Cowles, a Gartner analyst. "Delivery of a portion of the service to a customer is better than not delivering any part of it."

Charles Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst, also is unsure. "I think they're missing the boat by not choosing to take this path on their own," he says.

Besides Speakeasy, a couple of telcos consider standalone DSL worthy. Qwest, for one, has been doing so since February of last year. Verizon also plans to offer it.