The ghost that haunts Wi-Fi

• Tags:
• Ct-2,
• Phonepoint,
• Wi-fi,
• Voice Over Wi-fi

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Oct 2003 16:35 BST

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London is full of interesting archaeology from dead civilisations. The Tower of London has many fine examples -- as you're leaving Tower Hill tube station, glance up and to the left just before the exit. Pinned to the wall is a colourful if dusty sign advertising a long-forgotten wireless service named Phonepoint. Alongside its competitors Zonephone, Callpoint and Rabbit, this was part of a very high profile phone system called CT-2: flexible and affordable, it was going to bring digital mobile phones to the masses years before GSM. The masses thought otherwise. Launched in 1989 by high-powered consortia of banks, national telcos and equipment manufacturers, the system was dead by 1994.

CT-2's parallels with Wi-Fi are striking. The ideal user would have a base station at home, tied to their ordinary phone line. They'd use telepoints -- the CT-2 term for hot spots -- on their travels, and another in the office would link them to the work system. Telepoints appeared at stations, busy shopping centres and airports. There were a number of rather natty phones to choose between and, early teething problems notwithstanding, the system worked as planned.

It failed for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that you couldn't get incoming calls when you were on the move: there was no way to route a call to a telepoint. People carried pagers, and when they were bleeped they'd try and find somewhere to call back from. Telepoints weren't that common, though: the punters soon realised it was far cheaper and more reliable to ditch the phone, keep the pager, make like Clark Kent and leap into the nearest phone box.

Then there was compatibility between networks -- rather, there wasn't. Each network stood proud and alone, so if you had a Rabbit phone and were passing a Callpoint telepoint you might as well have been carrying a brick. CT-2 had been designed as a proper open standard, and there were no technical reasons why companies couldn't share infrastructure, but telco chief executives in the 1980s would as soon share a toothbrush. As for the work/home mix: people had phones in both places already. Why bother? As soon as cellular phones appeared in any numbers, the disadvantages of CT-2 became fatal.

The lessons are: people won't carry anything that merely duplicates the functions of something they have already; they have no tolerance for incompatibilities that are the result of corporate rivalry; and they all own the Dead Kennedys record Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.

Let's look at the proponents of Voice over IP combined with wireless networking. Fantastic opportunity for convergence, they cackle, especially if they're Cisco with fingers firmly in both pies. Hot spots are sweeping the world. Low call costs. Network access. From a user's viewpoint, the picture is less rosy.

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