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Going Wireless

Whether you're considering laying out two grand for a new 802.11b-enabled ultraportable or you've retrofitted your old notebook with a $100 wireless PC Card adapter, you probably expect to be able to answer e-mail and surf the Internet practically anywhere you happen to be. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Although the 802.11b (aka Wi-Fi) standard has grown in popularity for home networks, public places that use 802.11b devices are still rare. In the United States, fewer than a thousand locations offer Internet access points, the wired gateways with which Wi-Fi devices communicate via radio waves. Most commercial wireless locations are Starbucks coffee shops, which use VoiceStream's wireless services. The rest include a smattering of hotels and airports. And most airports offer wireless access only in first-class passenger lounges. (Direct your browser to www.wlana.org/public/index.htm to search for access point locations.)

Few Places To Roam

Research firm IDC reports that a relatively paltry 1.24 million access points were sold worldwide last year. About 60 percent of these were installed in the U.S., and most of those units were bought for offices, not public access, says Jason Smolek, an IDC analyst who follows enterprise networks.

Broader adoption of 802.11b will require seamless access availability across far-flung locations, regardless of provider. Although services can be reasonably priced--for instance, VoiceStream's Global Wireless by T-Mobile (formerly MobileStar) service costs $2.95 for the first 15 minutes and 20 cents for each additional minute, or $20 for 120 minutes on a prepaid card--service plans vary among providers, and they serve limited locations, so you can't be assured that your account will work wherever you travel.

At least one consortium, the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance--consisting of Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and 3Com--is working to establish a standard to help confused wireless customers. Called "WiFi Internet Service Provider roaming," or WISPr, it would regulate how companies share subscriber usage information, allowing wireless users to "roam," as cell phone users do, and to receive one bill from their primary providers.

Going The Distance

To see how wireless-ready ultraportables would fare in a typical office, we took a couple for a spin in some informal tests. We used the IBM ThinkPad X23, which has built-in wireless, and Sharp's PC-UM10M, which requires a wireless LAN PC Card adapter and a Linksys WAP11 access point. We sent files between offices and downloaded music from the Internet.

Although 802.11b allows for data transfers at speeds of up to 11 mbps, our past testing has shown that walls, floors, and other objects slow transfer rates considerably. It took us 2 minutes to copy a 4MB file over about 150 feet inside an office building. That's a transfer rate of about 0.25 mbps (still far faster than using a dial-up connection). But we lost our connection completely when we went down one floor. (There was no notable performance difference between built-in and PC Card adapters.) Although its performance and consistency can't match a wired network's, 802.11b can be useful in companies where wired ethernet is too difficult or expensive to add.

IDC's Smolek predicts that it will be several more years before all notebooks have Wi-Fi built in as ethernet is today, and perhaps longer for public wireless access to be widely available. Even then, he wonders how many people will use it.

"Do people really want to check e-mail at a coffeehouse? Or even at the airport? Some people want total access all the time, but I think this has been overblown," he says.

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