By Guy Kewney, Newswireless.net
Published Wednesday 7th April 2004 14:47 GMT
The future of wireless, we thought, was short-range repeaters on
street furniture. Either, the Wi-Fi based model proposed by
Westminster Council, or the revolutionary telematics model patented
by Last Mile communications.
Here at the WLAN Event in Olympia, Last Mile has officially revealed
its plans to install 150,000 wireless circuits, including memory, in
150,000 lampposts in the UK. To do this, it takes advantage of a near-
global agreement on roadside telematics - monitoring vehicles - on
which in plans to piggy-back commercial services.
The plan has raised eyebrows at Westminster Council, which last year
announced a radical scheme to put Wi-Fi on all its lamp-posts,
primarily to provide wireless connectivity to Council workers, but
with the hope of selling services to the public - hotspots, in fact.
I asked Westminster City chief exec Peter Rogers what he thought of
the Last Mile plan. "If that happens, we'll want to have words with
the Government," he said darkly.
It turns out that local authorities are, currently prohibited from
turning a profit from equipment they put in for their own use, and
Rogers believes that new legislation will be needed to permit this.
But Last Mile believes it has authorisation from the Government's
Highways Agency to make a profit on the telematics network.
The Last Mile technology uses very much faster data than Wi-Fi can
achieve, and enhances this with clever proxy/cache design. Each
lamppost contains not only the 63-65 GHz wireless unit, but a large
memory store, which will hold around 80 per cent of the data that
most people will want to download.
Data which isn't in the post will be sucked from the Internet over a
variety of backhaul routes; if necessary, from lamppost to post in a
high speed mesh, if no other backbone is handy.
Westminster, however, is committed to Wi-Fi.
It already has four wireless cameras, and Rogers spoke
enthusiastically, today, about how they have the potential to
revolutionise urban society.
"It's not just about having our workers connected, though we think
the productivity benefits of having back-office services available
for them will be enormous," he told NewsWireless.Net. "It's also a
social thing. With wireless, for example, we can take surveillance
cameras and re-site them instantly; as we were recently asked to do
by police. As a result, they now have a big drugs bust. And we can
tackle urgent social issues like public urination, graffiti, and so
on. We even can foresee being able to fit elderly citizens with
monitors to make sure they don't collapse and never get discovered."
But, said Rogers, for the City of Westminster to be able to make a
commercial service, the Government has to introduce new legislation.
"It's not likely that anybody will do anything before the next
General Election," he added, pushing the likely deployment of
commercial Wi-Fi out by a year or two. "But the Government has now
put a substantial amount of funding into the next stage of proving
the technology."
The possibility that the two schemes may work side by side can't be
discounted, however. According to Last Mile, it will be far cheaper
to deploy its telematics wireless technology: "The planned
installation programme will see upwards of 150,000 lampposts fitted
with very low power wireless data transmission systems, makes Last
Mile's new venture a resourceful way of transforming the pavement and
roads into an electronic carriageway. There will be no need to dig up
the roads to lay cables and the problems of centralised and expensive
network management systems are greatly reduced."
But there's nothing to stop lamppost owners - the partners of Last
Mile may well include local authorities - putting other wireless
technology onto the same pole, and using Last Mile as backbone, while
providing standard IEEE 802.11 wireless for public consumption.
Last Mile isn't saying who it sees as likely partners, but CEO Antony
Abell said that they were "in seriously negotiation" with several
unnamed parties. There are hints that some of these are mobile phone
providers, or telcos, and the discussions aren't limited to the UK.
"If you look at how much electronics and storage you can get into a
lamppost, or a traffic light, or any other bit of ordinary street
furniture such as a 'Keep Left' sign or a 'No Entry' indicator - it's
impressive. We reckon that we can launch our system with a very
conservative data service of up to 40 megabits per second for every
user in the micro-cell around a lamppost," Abell added. "And we're
confident that we can then upgrade the performance to a maximum of
400 megabits - maybe not for every user, but for several - in a 200-
300 metre range. That's more data than anybody currently knows what
to do with."
Key to Last Mile plans, is the idea of moving intelligence out of the
network, into the edge, even to the extent of putting "Magic Book"
software into client equipment. This will manage the intelligent
caching of information which has to be fetched from the Internet,
balancing it against what is held in the phone, or PDA or notebook.
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