Calgary’s new economy players say they’ve seen the future of the wireless Internet and one word describes it. Colossal.
They predict that within three years, an explosion of new wireless applications and technologies will produce faster network speeds, customized handheld devices and tailored applications for businesses and consumers.
“Wireless Internet is going to revolutionize the Internet as we know it today,” says Pete Garrett, vice-president of wireless access development in Calgary for Nortel Networks Corp.
Analysts predict that by 2003, the wireless market in North America will be more than $60 billion US. They also forecast that there will be more than one billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, up from 237 million in 1999 — and up to 70 per cent of all wireless devices will have Internet access.
“The concept of the Internet will actually be something incorporated in everybody’s everyday life,” says Charles Brown, vice-president of sales and marketing for Calgary-based WaveRider Communications Inc.
Carey Williamson, newly recruited iCORE senior research fellow at the University of Calgary, cautions that there are still technological hurdles to leap, such as increasing network speeds, eliminating signal interference from multiple wireless users and improving the design and function of handheld devices.
“We’re not there yet. The challenges are many,” Williamson says.
Wmode Inc. in Calgary thinks it has solved one problem plaguing today’s wireless web: fragmentation.
The North American mobile web market doesn’t link about 140 major wireless carriers with tens of thousands of content providers or Internet sites, says Wmode president and chief executive Dennis Woronuk. That has resulted in a meagre and often frustrating amount of available content and services.
Wmode, incorporated last summer, has developed software and infrastructure to bring carriers and providers together in one wireless clearinghouse, to offer mobile e-commerce or other fee-based Web services.
“We act as a clearinghouse to monitor the transactions and are able to post these transactions on the carrier phone bills,” says Emanuel Bertolin, vice-president of marketing and sales.
Wmode’s model is partly based on the highly successful iMode mobile commerce model in Japan. In only two years of operation, iMode has topped 17 million users accessing more than 30,000 content providers.
The Calgary company says as far as it knows, its clearinghouse is the first of its kind in North America.
So how does it work? A handheld device user wanting access to a gaming site, for example, would simply go to the content provider’s Web site.
The site would then receive identification from the wireless carrier, telling Wmode’s clearinghouse whether the user has a valid subscription.
If so, the user would be granted access to the site. If the ID wasn’t valid, the user would be prompted on his or her handheld and asked if he or she wished to subscribe to the service.
Content providers will have flexibility in determining their access rate plans, Bertolin says. A gaming site might choose to charge 25 cents per game or a $2-per-month subscription, for example.
“We would confirm with the carrier that the person has a billing relationship that would allow that type of charge to be put on the bill,” Bertolin explains. “It would show up on the phone bill at the end of the month for that person.”
Wmode’s clearinghouse can be used for numerous Internet “micro-transactions” that are now available or in the pipe, from purchasing news, stock quotes and music online to offline applications such as paying vending machines. In Finland, consumers can already use their handhelds to buy sodas from vending machines and pay for car washes and parking meters.
“If content people have a way of getting paid, it drives the growth of content very dramatically,” Woronuk notes.
Wmode, which is privately funded, partnered with Oracle Corp. to develop the clearinghouse’s database and Sun Microsystems Inc. for the hardware.
Wmode has opened an office in Boulder, Colo. The company is in negotiations with several large wireless carriers in North America and Europe, as well as one in Asia, Woronuk says.
It plans field trials of its system in the third quarter and full deployment before the end of the year.
Another Calgary-based company that is pushing the envelope of the wireless Internet is WaveRider Communications. WaveRider, with offices throughout the world and products in 35 countries, maintains a 75-employee research-and-development centre in the city.
The company specializes in providing high-speed Internet access to “infrastructure challenged” communities that don’t have access via telephone DSL or cable service.
Its LMS (Last Mile Solution) 3000 technology is based on lower-frequency wireless operating at 900 megahertz, slightly higher than a cellphone’s 800-megahertz frequency, says WaveRider’s Charles Brown. The lower frequency means the wireless signals easily go through windows, doorways and “bounce around offices.” So a small antenna installed beside someone’s personal computer is usually sufficient “for you to be able to make and send e-mails and browse the Internet,” Brown says.
WaveRider has partnered with Internet service provider Platinum Communications Corp. on a pilot project in High River. It is billed as the first “non line-of-sight” (no outside antennas required) high-speed wireless Internet access in the world. The service is delivering the Internet to rural users at speeds of up to two megabits per second, compared with 56 kilobits per second for a telephone dial-up.
WaveRider and Platinum will unroll the service in Okotoks over the next several months, with other rural Alberta communities on the planned deployment list. “We’re the only company that’s developing anything or shipping anything in this space in the world, that we know of,” Brown says.
The company also provides fixed wireless Internet access, at higher speeds of 7.5 to 8 megabits, to businesses. Its LMS2000 systems are installed in Foothills Industrial Park in Calgary and at the Airport Corporate Centre.
Mel Wong, executive director of research and technology commercialization for Alberta Innovation and Science, says Calgary wireless firms like WaveRider, Wi-Lan and Cell-Loc “have niche products which are unparalleled at the moment from what I can tell in the world.”
