Peter Griffin: Wireless hotzones cool off too quickly

COMMENT

The deja vu settled on me like a mist, competing with the radio frequencies for my attention.

I was sitting outside a trendy inner-city cafe as two guys in suits with a laptop gave me the pitch.

I'd done the same thing a couple of years previously. Same company, same story, different cafe, different suits.

They were talking wireless fidelity (wi-fi) and how the hotspots concept had been replaced with "hotzones".

No longer would you be restricted to a few scattered cafes for public wireless access, you could be in an apartment 100m away, in a park across the street or an office floors above the cafe and enjoy the same service 24 hours a day.

The talk again was about "ubiquitous coverage", how Reach Wireless had a growing legion of hotspots up and down the country for travelling web-surfers.

This would make life easier for us surfers, I was reminded.

The sudden re-emergence of RoamAD last week and its tie-up with hotspot operator Reach Wireless is interesting.

Back in 2002, when RoamAD planned to operate the hotspots itself and partner with a telco for billing and customer care, wi-fi was being hyped to the hilt but, frankly, was a much harder sell.

Laptops were a lot more expensive and wireless cards in almost all cases came as an after-sale extra.

So much has changed in the technology's favour.

Intel has made wi-fi on a chip a reality with Centrino.

The price of laptops has plummeted - you can pick up a basic machine for $800.

The technology is a lot more robust and better understood by hardware and software vendors as well as the public.

RoamAD never got off the ground and its network lay dormant as Citylink successfully launched CafeNet, a hotspot network spanning Wellington.

Now should be its time, but the fact is, the issues facing wi-fi are exactly the same that RoamAD encountered two years ago - ubiquitous coverage is a long way off and a decent wi-fi business model has yet to emerge.

Which leads me to one main conclusion - wi-fi has to be free.

Well, "free" is a euphemism, we'll pay for it somewhere along the way, but the cost of access should be built into whatever it is we're consuming while we loiter around a wireless hotspot, be it a cappuccino or a Big Mac.

But first, a little more on the pros and cons of Reach. Armed with a Reach account and my laptop which has wi-fi built into it, I headed for the "zone" - a 3km square slab of the CBD where Reach is using the resurrected RoamAD network to deliver wireless high-speed internet.

Sitting in the warm afternoon sun in Freyberg Square, it felt incredibly empowering to be web-capable, streaming music from Knac.com, my favourite web radio station.

Vulcan Lane was awash with coverage, but I hadn't made it to the stairs in the Glaister Ennor building at the top of Vulcan Lane before I'd lost Reach's signal.

Likewise, the open-air Chancery was a strong hotspot. When I ventured into the lobby of an adjoining building the signal fell off.

It was the same for the rest of the zone. Out in the open the signal was strong; as soon as I ventured into the atrium of a shopping centre or towards the back of a shop I was down to one bar of coverage and web pages were failing to load.

From the plush hallway on the 22nd floor of Metropolis wi-fi was a no-go, despite a site existing on top of Metropolis and Reach boss Steve Simms telling me the whole northern side of the building all the way to the top could log on as RoamAD's technology is three-dimensional in its coverage.

In the front lobby of Metropolis, Reach was also, well, out of reach. Oddly, it was only in the concrete-swathed internal carpark of Metropolis that I was able to access the web.

Reach is talking about businesses and residents in surrounding buildings using its wi-fi as their primary internet connections. The fact is, a good percentage of the zone has patchy coverage.

Maybe if I had an external card with a more powerful antenna, I'd pick up a signal with greater ease more often. But that really defeats the purpose.

The advantage of wi-fi is that it is built in, there's no need to shell out $150 on a card.

On Sunday I wandered up Ponsonby Rd, laptop in my backpack, and claimed the last free table at the Dizengoff cafe.

It took me about two minutes to log myself on to Reach's network and 10 seconds more to connect to a news website.

I was getting connection speeds of between 312kbps and 520kbps according to speed tests at PC Pitstop. Highly impressive.

But in the video library just behind Dizengoff coverage dropped off completely. I wasn't able to get a connection.

That's fine, but it's far from the "ubiquitous" pitch I received from Reach boss Steve Simms and Martyn Levy, chairman of RoamAD, when the pair met me in the heart of the wireless zone last week.

I still have to venture to a fairly confined location to get coverage.

WiMax, an extension of wi-fi that is on RoamAD's product roadmap and which is designed to stretch coverage kilometres out from a base station will change that.

In the meantime, while I hope the likes of Reach and CafeNet thrive, wi-fi really needs the weight of a Telecom or Vodafone to give it scale, both in number of sites and ease of billing.

Telecom says it will attack wi-fi in three areas this year - conventional hotspots which it will service with its own equipment as well as through partnerships with independent wi-fi suppliers, wireless home networking, and corporate wireless networks.

And it is not averse to the "free" model.

"Maybe a small subscription," says Rod Snodgrass, the general manager of Telecom's wired division.

"We really want them being billed for and using the same bandwidth they've already purchased," he said.

In other words, log in using your Xtra password and consume your existing Jetstream data allowance. No double-up on billing and accounts.

Telecom also has the power to negotiate with internet aggregators such as iPass, its present partner for global roaming.

The "free" model is happening in the United States. Phone company Verizon has 150 hotspots in New York but is giving free access to paid-up Verizon internet subscribers.

It wants to spread the service further along the east coast with 850 hotspots. Smaller US airports are offering wi-fi as a way of competing with larger hub airports that offer pay services.

Back home, CafeNet's usage skyrocketed when it offered free wi-fi weekends.

Free is an easy sell, just wander up with your laptop, buy the obligatory cup of coffee or whatever and claim your log-on code. Until then wi-fi won't be much more than a novelty for anyone other than travellers and business people.

* Email Peter Griffin