Is Wi-Fi Ready To Fly?

What with McDonalds giving away one hour's free access with every meal and Boeing building flying cyber cafes, Wi-Fi looks set to take off.

Being wired is old hat. It's time to get unwired. So declares Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, which has launched a new family of chips called "Centrino". The company's aim is to turn "Wi-Fi", a way to gain access to the Internet wirelessly, into a standard feature of portable computers. The launch was accompanied by announcements from other firms planning to charge for Wi-Fi access in public spaces. "Take your laptop to a hotspot and you can surf the net unplugged" went the pitch.

This will certainly be welcome news to the many travellers who have flicked open their laptops in airports or railway stations hoping to catch a Wi-Fi signal, only to be disappointed. Although there are millions of private Wi-Fi access points, or "hotspots", there are relatively few public ones.

Toshiba and Accenture have announced plans to set up 10,000 hotspots in America. While Cometa, a joint venture between Intel, IBM, AT&T and others, has said it will build 20,000. A consortium of five Asian telecoms plans to build 20,000 hotspots across Asia by the end of the year. Similar ventures are planned in Europe. But it is the hamburger chain McDonalds that is bringing Wi-Fi to the mainstream: a handful of restaurants are throwing in an hour's free Wi-Fi access with every meal.

Mission critical jobs

Wi-Fi started out as a not-too-serious gadget for techno-geeks and home hobbyists. But it is now making its way into corporations. Its super fast connections to the web cost only a quarter as much as the spaghetti jungle of wires companies use today.

Not surprisingly, the technology is proving very attractive to firms who feel they would derive real benefits from venturing into wireless. General Motors, United Parcel Service (UPS), CareGroup and other organisations are using Wi-Fi for mission-critical jobs in factories, trucks, stores, and even in hospitals. "We firmly believe that this is the tipping point," said Intel Corp. CEO Craig R. Barrett.

Cyber cafes in the sky

He may well be right. Go to runways in Seattle and Frankfurt and you'll find engineers tinkering with antennas and satellite links. This isn't routine avionics. Instead, Boeing Co. (BA) is preparing a brand new business - flying cyber cafes. By early next year, more than 100 Boeing jets are scheduled to be equipped with Wi-Fi. For £15 or so, per flight, laptop users will be able to log on to the net while soaring above the clouds. They could shop on eBay, attend a business meeting via Instant Messaging, and possibly even make voice calls over the web.

Such is Boeing's faith in the new technology that over the next decade it hopes to outfit nearly 4,000 planes with Wi-Fi service. "Wi-Fi is on an explosive growth path," says Scott F. Carson, president of the company's Connexion by Boeing unit.

Intel and computer makers are banking on Wi-Fi to spur laptop sales. The indicators are good. On 15 April Intel announced that strong laptop sales, powered by Wi-Fi-ready Centrino chips, helped boost first-quarter profits. Microsoft is also in on the act. Its Windows XP operating system is specially adapted to handle Wi-Fi. "You could say that Wi-Fi is the killer app that gets people to upgrade to Windows XP," says Pieter Knook, the company's vice president for network service providers

Consumer electronics

Consumer-electronics is another industry counting on Wi-Fi - in this case to link appliances in the home. Gadget geeks are already sending MP3 songs and videos from their computers to TVs and stereos with Wi-Fi. But doing this could become a lot simpler and faster over the next couple of years as the new generation of Wi-Fi rolls out. Apart from anything else, connection speeds will rocket to 54 megabits per second.

Also on the horizon are Wi-Fi cellular phones that would let people move from Wi-Fi to cellular networks without even noticing. These are being developed by Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson and should be ready in 18 months. In time, Wi-Fi could even feed data into smart networks in the home or factory to automatically monitor climate controls or industrial supply chains.

"There's no upper limit to how you can use this technology," says Dean Douglas, vice president for telecommunications at IBM Global Services. "In that, it's like the web."

Plain Words editorial
4.6.2003