What's Next: The Next Next Big Thing

David H. Freedman

Suggested Links

• AT&T, Starbucks to Offer Wi-Fi
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• Digital Lifestyle: December 2007
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• Staying Connected: WiFi Hot Spots to Go

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Hot-spot value is a matter of location, location, location, but much also depends on the type of technology you use. This brings us to the second great WiFi innovation -- high-gain antennas. If you look at an Apple AirPort base station, it appears to have no antenna at all. Even the Linksys WAP11 wireless access point, which is among the least expensive and most popular WiFi devices, has just two little rubber antennas, each about four inches tall. These are low-gain antennas, which explains the limited range of such devices. But it is possible to put much larger high-gain antennas on wireless access points, greatly extending their range.

And I mean greatly. My own record for longest WiFi connection is approximately seven miles, which isn't bad for a technology normally thought to run out of gas at 300 feet. The absolute record to my knowledge is (so far) 72 miles! And this is all perfectly legal and within FCC specifications. So WiFi can be used for long-distance connections too. For more than a year, I got my Internet service that way here in California wine country, and it never failed.

Long links have value by themselves, but that value can be greatly enhanced for business if high-gain antennas are used to serve hot spots. Here the definition of "location, location, location" changes. Hot spots typically require a high-speed Internet connection to the location and the presence of a WiFi base station, both of which need the permission of whoever controls the space. Let's say it's Starbucks. And let's figure Starbucks probably wants to be paid.

High-gain antennas can change that situation in some cases, according to Dan Arra, president and CEO of Gatespeed Broadband, a wireless Internet service provider in San Jose, Calif. "We use our existing Wireless Points of Presence to blast a group of stores, coffeehouses, restaurants from atop a building," says Arra. "We don't do this everywhere, only where we already have bandwidth and roof rights. There is no extra cost to us except the access point [base station]. I set one up this morning. I put an access point with an 18dBi directional antenna on top of our downtown San Jose [point of presence] and pointed it at the Starbucks, Rock 'N Tacos, Spiedo restaurant, and Campbell Cigar shop below. It works great. I got 1.2 megabits per second inside these places with my WiFi card. I didn't have to ask Starbucks or offer to pay them anything!"

Since there is no way a business can legally exclude radio waves from its premises, Gatespeed's hot spots are much less expensive to build, especially since several such hot spots can share a single Internet connection, where previously they each would have required a connection. When the super-aggregators come calling, Gatespeed won't have just a few restaurants to offer, it will have most of downtown San Jose.

Say you run a business with offices near the top of a tall building in almost any city. Becoming a wireless ISP is as simple as suction-cupping a high-gain antenna inside one of your windows and connecting it to your high-speed Internet connection. Customers use their own high-gain antennas, mounting them outside their buildings or suction-cupping them inside their own windows facing your location. It doesn't require much precision.

But what if you want wireless Internet service and your window is facing the wrong direction? That's where yet another technology comes into play -- a technology that can ratchet up Metcalfe's Law yet another notch. Called HomePlug, it uses the electric wiring of your home or building to share data at speeds up to 14 megabits per second over distances up to 1,000 feet. HomePlug effectively puts a network connection at every electrical outlet, since that's the distance between electric outlets set by the building code. The business opportunities here are obvious. Let an apartment building share a single Internet connection, perhaps that fixed wireless Internet connection from the other side of the building. It could be the landlord who sets up this business, adding the Internet cost onto the rent. Or it could be the tenant in apartment 3-C who has that high-gain antenna on his window or who has a business DSL (you can't legally share residential DSLs).

As long as people are on the same electrical transformer, they can communicate, so you can serve half your neighborhood. Recruit your friends, and serve half of every neighborhood. This is high tech but low cost, and most people don't know about it because the first version of HomePlug was limited to 16 devices. But the next version, shipping now, is good for up to 128 nodes. And the version after that, which will appear in 2005, supports HDTV! Suddenly, and entirely because these products are minimally regulated, the phone company and cable company are both in jeopardy. Now that's disruptive technology.

Contributing editor Robert X. Cringely is a writer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur specializing in high technology. Contact him at cringely@inc.com.

Please E-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

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