Walk or drive through Portland, Ore. and you’re likely to see bumper stickers, backpacks, and T-shirts promoting wireless fidelity: “Got Wi-Fi?” The high-contrast black background and white letters inquire in a style made popular by the dairy campaign “Got Milk?” The obvious implication: Broadband wireless Internet access is a need. 

While it may not be a primordial need, it is certainly a universal one.  

The “Got Wi-Fi?” slogan is the work of Nigel Ballard, who uses the campaign to advance wireless Internet access in Portland. Ballard runs JoeJava Wireless Consultancy and represents Personal Telco, a nonprofit community wireless service provider.

Intel recently donated networking components to the community group to outfit the first ever hostel with broadband wireless. The hostel joins more than 100 area “hot spots,” or wireless access points, throughout the city. The hostel got Wi-Fi.

A world away from Portland, Intel is helping the people of Zamora, Spain get Wi-Fi too, providing services and selling wireless equipment to enable the whole city of 68,000 to enjoy wireless broadband access. Zamora will be the world’s first “hot city.”

Whether selling solutions, contributing equipment, investing capital, or forging industry alliances, Intel is actively promoting wireless technology across the globe.

In October Intel announced plans to invest $150 million in companies developing Wi-Fi products through Intel Capital, estimating that as many as 30 million laptops worldwide could be equipped with Wi-Fi capability within three years; many of them will use Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology. In December Intel, AT&T, and IBM announced the creation of Cometa Networks, a new company that will provide wholesale wireless Internet access across the United States.

Wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi for short, has been around for years as a wireless extension to LAN technology using the 802.11 protocol to broadcast Ethernet packets over radio waves. More recently, however, the introduction of public Wi-Fi services in places such as cafes and airports now allows people to surf the Web or keep in touch while away from home or office, using Wi-Fi enabled devices.  

The growing wireless world, alive with activity, buzzes with regulatory and technical challenges. That’s why at Intel you’ll find a company-wide effort to explore, invent, lobby, research, plan, and ply the routes of the wireless tomorrow.

The end user: center of the wireless world
“Unwiring the consumer minimizes physical connections and inspires people’s imaginations to explore new ways to work, live, and play through easy-to-use technology,” Intel CEO Craig Barrett said recently at the Consumer Electronics Show. Barrett emphasized Intel’s Centrino mobile technology, innovation that will unwire consumers, giving them more freedom to connect to people, information, and entertainment at any time from any place on any device.

Intel’s Ken Anderson, design anthropologist and manager of People and Practices Research, focuses research on the unwired consumer. His group donated wireless components to Personal Telco in Portland in order to study end user behavior. “We’re actively engaged in promoting the adoption of wireless worldwide,” Anderson tells Circuit News. “And one way we do this is through learning more about early adopters of the technology. The donation to the hostel was a good fit for us, an opportunity for Intel researchers to study new users and explore usage models.”  

In pioneering technology for a progressively wireless world, Intel has the opportunity to provide industry leadership to find solutions for a number of the technical, social, and regulatory challenges facing wide scale adoption of Wi-Fi. The company is researching solutions on several fronts, lobbying government and regulatory agencies, forging strategic alliances across the industry, investing millions of dollars in companies that develop Wi-Fi products, and donating equipment to projects that will further Intel’s understanding and promote adoption of Wi-Fi on a worldwide scale. 

Zamora zips into a world without wires
Dozens of slender white Intel antennas relay wireless signals across the city of Zamora, Spain enabling service provider Wireless and Satellite Networks (WSN) to connect the whole medieval town of 68,000 underneath a wireless canopy. WSN offers this inexpensive commercial broadband access to subscribers at about half the cost of dial-up access and many times its speed. “It’s still in the early stages, but this could be a sea change in the application of this technology,” says Stacy Smith, general manager of Intel for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Unlike the smaller-scale hot spots in public places across Europe and the United States, this project in Zamora is bringing Internet to the masses. 

Projects like these help Intel identify issues faced by early adopters of the technology, eliminate obstacles, and make possible thousands of WLAN “hot spots” or access points worldwide. For instance, WSN experimented with three or four different network topologies until it found one that really worked. Intel showed the service provider how costs could be reduced by combining routing capabilities with transport capabilities within a single access point using the Wi-Fi protocol.  

To meet its networking requirements, WSN effectively customized the Intel access point product. “We call it the Wirelator,” says Manuel Maese, director of corporate development strategy for WSN. ”It’s like a souped up access point that can do radio access transmission and transport transmission, connecting one access point to another and all of them to the backbone of the network.”  

In the next development stage, Intel and WSN plan to enhance the functionality of the Wirelator, adding new service features that will make it most suitable for public Wi-Fi networks. 

Removing the roadblocks: physical limitations of Wi-Fi technology
Under ideal conditions an 802.11b wireless signal can travel about 150 to 300 feet outdoors, but natural obstacles such as hills, buildings, and trees can block a wireless signal. Additionally, the speed of 802.11 systems depends on the distance between the relaying and receiving components. The farther away the remote is from the base station, the lower the speed.  

In Zamora, for instance, the medieval city’s elaborate architecture and numerous stone facades threatened to distort the signal, hurting both speed and reliability. Using high gain Intel® 2.4 GHz Directional Yagi Antennae, service provider WSN successfully bridges distances of up to five miles. Additionally, the use of Intel® 2.4 GHz Omni Directional Indoor/Outdoor Antennae provides WSN with a strong, uniform 360-degree signal. 

Today, Intel and other companies are racing to come up with innovative antennas that extend Wi-Fi’s range, and chip designs that increase its speed. In a research and development project known as the “Last Mile,” Intel researchers have been experimenting with sectorized antennae to cover a more predictable swath or beam width. Such antennae can successfully beam coverage to an area with greater than a 20-mile radius to provide coverage for more than one recipient.

In the pilot, about a dozen participants’ homes were recipients of the invisible conduit. The homes enjoyed strong wireless broadband signals, which carried data at two to three megabits per second. These homes required no digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable modem, just a simple antenna a few inches tall mounted on the roof.

Projects like these illustrate how innovation at Intel is helping overcome some of the challenges facing wireless technology, but other challenges will require broad industry support and regulatory changes. Can the nascent industry avert a standards war? Can wireless Internet service providers generate substantial profit? Join us next week in this column for Part II of this series.

* * *

Do you have an opinion about this topic, or any other in Circuit News? Write a Letter to the Editor.

Tech Talk Tuesday  Daniel Jajeh reports and writes Tech Talk Tuesday, which is a regular feature of Circuit News. Daniel has previously worked as a systems engineer, application developer, and technical trainer. Tech Talk Tuesday explains technology in plain language. If you have an idea or topic you'd like to see covered in this column, please let us know.

Related Links
Intel Reveals New Brand Name
Zamora, Spain Case Study in PDF Format
Intel Announces Expansion of Wi-Fi Wireless Efforts
Cometa Networks Formed to Provide National Wireless Internet Access
 

More Intel News