When the government’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator turned its eye on the fledgling Wi-Fi industry last year, cynics thought it a foregone conclusion the ruling would follow the tradition of protecting state-owned monopolies rather than stimulating competition.
So it came as a pleasant surprise — perhaps not to Telkom’s T-Zone or Transtel’s Wireless G Wi-Fi businesses, but certainly to the rest of us — when the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa ruled last October that anyone may operate a Wi-Fi “hotspot” without a licence, provided it is limited to their premises.
The need to untangle the spaghetti of ethernet and telephone cables found in most offices today is bound to make wireless local area networks a hit. A few years ago it was easy to tell which socket was for a phone and which was for a network card. But the rat’s nest of wires grew ever more confusing as the jacks for both came to look identical.
That wouldn’t have turned out to be such a bad design if the long-promised convergence of computer and telephone networking ever arrived.
Restaurants and coffee shops are hoping Wi-Fi is about to make it so easy to switch desks that people will start working from their tables rather than the office. The Mugg & Bean chain, in partnership with M-Web, is putting up Wi-Fi hotspots at its coffee shops. Airports will also be offering this facility following a contract the Airports Company of South Africa awarded to Wireless G.
But Wi-Fi doesn’t address a problem more pressing than local area networks’ untidy cables and unlabelled sockets: how to communicate with the outside world. For this, businesses have been entirely dependent on Telkom’s lines, which have a dreadful reputation of going dead because of cable theft or thunderstorms.
One wireless alternative to fixed lines has been to use a satellite TV aerial and decoder to receive incoming Internet data. But a modem and phone line is still needed to send outgoing e-mails and requests for Web pages. Some Internet access providers have over the years attempted to offer radio links, bypassing Telkom’s lines entirely, but they and their customers soon found themselves snagged by South Africa’s private-sector-unfriendly spectrum allocation and telecommunications laws. But now a state-owned enterprise with legal rights on radio spectrum, Sentech, has entered the fray with MyWireless.
Sentech offers three speeds of MyWireless, the faster the more expensive. The cheapest is a 128 Kbps wireless link for R649 a month, and the most expensive a 512 Kbps link for R1 449 a month. The latter is as fast as the “downstream” speed of Telkom’s ADSL service, which costs individuals R680 and businesses R800 a month. Factoring in the added phone cost of ADSL, Sentech’s MyWireless 512 will be cheaper for businesses that spend more than 30 hours a month online. The slower and cheaper services are probably fine for many businesses, and the wireless link has the advantage of offering “always on” Internet access.
The modem required for MyWireless is currently bundled into Sen-tech’s R500 installation and monthly subscription charge. This is another attraction, since services such as ADSL and ISDN usually involve the extra expense of buying a modem as well as paying a one-off registration fee.
However, businesses needing constant Internet access should probably cost out a Telkom Diginet leased line or ADSL subscription first.
MyWireless is unlikely to be cheaper, but does have the advantage of sidestepping the cable theft and thunderstorm outages that plague fixed lines in this country.
Sentech is offering MyWireless only in certain areas of major cities. But there is a wireless option covering a wide area of the country: the cellphone networks. That WAP — a technology that lets cellphones double as Web browsers — would turn out to be a fizzle isn’t that surprising considering the tariffs charged by cellphone networks and the data transmission speeds of cellphones.
Cellphone calls cost five times more, and send and receive data six times slower than a landline, which equates to every bit costing 30 times more. So until the networks make their tariffs affordable, cellphone Internet access will remain something people only use until they receive their first bill.
Cellphones are too slow and expensive for everyday Internet use, but are very handy for short text messages. The SMS service of cellphones has already turned into a major competitor of Hallmark on Mother’s Day. Cellphone networks support another data service called general packet radio service (GPRS).
Locally, MTN Network Solutions recently launched a service branded CorporateMobility, which costs businesses R8,67 a megabyte of data transmitted. It is pitching the service at retailers wanting to verify credit card transactions with their banks, fleet-management companies currently using SMS to check the location of their trucks, as well as to monitor the operation of remote machinery.
People who work from small offices or home offices haven’t battled with a spaghetti of cables to the same extent as their corporate counterparts, but they still tend to trip over wires. A wireless technology called Bluetooth promises to help here. This is an industry effort, including Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba, to make devices communicate with each other using short-range radio.
So are communications wires about to become a relic of a bygone era? Technology guru Nicholas Negroponte made a prediction a few years ago that, while things traditionally done over a wire, like telephone conversations, would go wireless, things traditionally done by wireless, such as broadcasting music and TV, would in turn be transmitted via cable. This “Negroponte Switch” has happened to phone conversations, but video on demand still isn’t here. However, the attraction of one day being able to summon up any film or music you like over a phone line makes their future look fairly secure.