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Font Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print David Frith | March 25, 2008
IN just a few years, WiFi hotspots - now spreading through cities worldwide like a virus - will become as irrelevant as telephone booths.

That's the opinion, firmly expressed the other day, of Johan Bergendahl, chief marketing officer of Ericsson, the giant Swedish telecommunications equipment company.
He reckons WiFi is doomed because: (a) more and more people are switching to mobile third-generation (3G) phone services such as Telstra's Next G, and (b) support for high-speed packet access (HSPA) networks such as Next G is being built into more laptops.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Ericsson doesn't make WiFi gear, but it does make a lot of 3G phone equipment.

Goaded by an enthusiastic Sol Trujillo, it set up the nationwide Next G network, among others round the globe, in a matter of months for a cool $1 billion or so.

Doubleclick is a pretty enthusiastic user of Next G's 3G data services.

With a little 3G gizmo plugged into the USB port on our Apple MacBook, and an external antenna plugged into the module, we can log on to the internet wirelessly at very fast speeds just about anywhere in Australia, even in moving trains.

Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison offer similar services, although without the geographic spread at this stage.

Vodafone has contracted Ericsson to roll out a new HSPA network by December that should reach up to 95 per cent of the population (Next G claims 98 per cent coverage).

At least two computer companies in Australia - Dell and Asus - offer 3G SIM cards implanted in some of their laptops.

So 3G mobile broadband is definitely on the march Down Under, but the views of Johan Bergendahl notwithstanding, Doubleclick wouldn't write off WiFi just yet.

Hotspots, many of them free, are continuing to sprout in our cities and even smaller centres, and huge numbers of consumers have installed WiFi networks in their homes to broadcast internet and printer connections to every room - and increasingly to stream music or video between computer and living-room television or hi-fi rig.

Thanks to Intel, the biggest chipmaker, WiFi is built into the chipsets of pretty well every notebook PC on the market: just look for the Intel Centrino sticker.

Soon, that will be updated to include Wi-MAX, a more powerful successor to WiFi that covers whole cities.

According to iPass, an outfit that provides worldwide access to hotspots in places like airports, hotels and cafes, Australia has almost tripled its use of WiFi in such places in the past year, and now ranks eighth nation in the world for use of the technology (the US is first, Britain second, and we fit between Japan and Belgium). By far the most WiFi sessions take place in airports around the globe, iPass reports, followed by hotels, cafes and retail centres.

The most popular airport in the world for WiFi is Chicago's O'Hare, but no Aussie airport rates in the top 10.

Now it's true that if you have a 3G mobile broadband connection, you're unlikely to use an airport WiFi hotspot; simply because the airport monopolies charge mightily for WiFi, but there are a lot more WiFi users than 3G mobile broadband users, and we can't see the hotspots becoming the equivalent of unused telephone boxes for years to come.

One straw in the wind is the Apple iPhone, which is yet to be seen in Australia, but selling a motza in the US. The iPhone connects to the internet via WiFi and, thanks in part to an excellent inbuilt browser, the US owners of these devices are going crazy over that service.

A six-month study by measurement firm M:Metrics finds nearly 85 per cent of iPhone purchasers regularly use the device to access news and other content on the web.

This has confounded industry gurus who predicted web browsing on handheld devices would never take off. Suddenly the prospects for mobile internet services seem much brighter.

Apple is not the only manufacturer to see the possibilities. Nokia, the leading mobile phone maker, sells a few handheld internet browsing devices, including its N95 phone and N800 internet tablet.

The N800 is soon to be replaced by the N810, a clever little device with a reasonable screen, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, and a prop-up stand.

There are WiFi and 3G connections, a web browser and GPS navigation maps.

So WiFi is far from dying, or even indisposed, but there's no doubt 3G mobile broadband is an up-and-comer that will make inroads in its market.

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