Mobile working Toolkit

The ghost that haunts Wi-Fi

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Oct 2003 16:35 BST

For a start, there's the small matter of what to wear. We all have mobiles already. Will phone companies put Wi-Fi into their products? There's a lot of resistance from the carriers, and currently little advantage to the users. You can carry a PDA with Wi-Fi and a voice stack, sure, but it won't work anything like a mobile phone: you can sit in a hotel lobby with a headset plugged into your laptop, but you'll look several thousand times less cool than someone with the latest, shiniest mobile glittering away in their hands.

Companies don't care about cool: they care about cash and that's about it. You can buy a Wi-Fi-only phone and configure your work network to support it -- this looks good on paper and saves organisations with big campuses big money. The users, who have to carry around a work phone as well as their personal mobile, may not be so enthused. If mobile phones, like PCs, had a standard expansion bus that meant third parties could add networking independently of the original manufacturers, then the dynamics would be entirely different. There is no such standard, nor is there any sign that the industry wants one: we know who inherited the CT-2 toothbrush.

Can your friends find you when you're logged on? Instant messaging works, but that is a morass of incompatible standards: I already run three IM clients on my PC, and I don't want to do that on the mobile as well. Can a mobile client switch instantly, silently and efficiently between hot spots run by different companies? Ask anyone who's spent a day swearing at network card A's unwillingness to talk to access point B, downloading drivers and Googling for the true meaning of inscrutable error messages. As for billing: right. All these things must work perfectly before public voice over Wi-Fi has a hope. That's not enough.

For voice over Wi-Fi to be a serious threat to the cellular system, it can't be a me-too system. The things that make it attractive to corporates won't cut it with private users, and almost anything you can do with Wi-Fi and voice you can do with cellular networks -- where the incumbents are well-funded, dug in like rattlesnakes and more than willing to fight.

Voice over Wi-Fi needs that old-fashioned idea, the killer application. And that has to use the one thing that Wi-Fi has that 2G or 3G phones do not -- megabit broadband. As any ISP will tell you, that's shorthand for digital media delivery. When my Wi-Fi phone in Wichita will play my hi-fi sound files from my home server in London, then I'll listen. Until then, I'll carry on taking in the sights of Old London Town, the graveyard of a million good ideas done badly.