Wi-Fi cell phone sooner than we think?

A few weeks ago, Miami Lakes, Fla., Calypso Wireless issued a press release announcing the second generation of its wireless LAN access points, expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2003. Hidden in the second paragraph of the announcement (more on that later) was a description of its C1250i video cell phone, which uses Wi-Fi to connect to an access point. There's not much detail on the C1250i, except that it can connect via Wi-Fi (unclear whether this includes voice, or if it's just data connections; I'm counting videoconferencing as a data application).

The company also recently inked a contract (worth $500 million, according to Calypso) to provide China Telecom with phones and network systems, and it is also looking for deals with U.S. carriers.

Calypso claims that its new access points can create "guaranteed speeds" of 20M bit/sec across twisted pair copper wiring, which would outclass cable and DSL connections. Again, the company says that if a carrier deploys the Calypso technology (one assumes that the carrier would need some back-end equipment), then an end user could connect an access point to a regular phone line to achieve the higher speeds. Other details were unavailable, but you can check out the Calypso Web site (http://www.calypsowireless.com) if you want to dig around yourself.

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A few weeks ago, Miami Lakes, Fla., Calypso Wireless issued a press release announcing the second generation of its wireless LAN access points, expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2003. Hidden in the second paragraph of the announcement (more on that later) was a description of its C1250i video cell phone, which uses Wi-Fi to connect to an access point. There's not much detail on the C1250i, except that it can connect via Wi-Fi (unclear whether this includes voice, or if it's just data connections; I'm counting videoconferencing as a data application).

The company also recently inked a contract (worth $500 million, according to Calypso) to provide China Telecom with phones and network systems, and it is also looking for deals with U.S. carriers.

Calypso claims that its new access points can create "guaranteed speeds" of 20M bit/sec across twisted pair copper wiring, which would outclass cable and DSL connections. Again, the company says that if a carrier deploys the Calypso technology (one assumes that the carrier would need some back-end equipment), then an end user could connect an access point to a regular phone line to achieve the higher speeds. Other details were unavailable, but you can check out the Calypso Web site (http://www.calypsowireless.com) if you want to dig around yourself.

What's interesting about this announcement is that Wi-Fi and cell phones are about to converge. We hear rumors all the time about adding Wi-Fi to a cell phone, so that if a user is within a Wi-Fi area, they can connect to voice or data through the "faster" connection.

In this newsletter we recently addressed the issue of using a Wi-Fi phone to get "free" voice calls at a public hot spot (see links below).

A warning, though - while Wi-Fi promoters often tout the "11M bit/sec" data rate, that speed is misleading. First, the signaling overhead of the technology brings the actual throughput down to between 4M and 6M bit/sec (if you're lucky). Second, because Wi-Fi is a shared connection, every user on the access point is sharing that data rate. The more users who share the access point, the lower your bandwidth.

Third, the "11M bit/sec" data rate is only the rate between the client card (your notebook) and the access point. On the back end, the access point is connected either to a DSL, cable or T-1 connection, and T-1 tops out at 1.5M bit/sec.

The 11M-bit/sec speed is impressive if you want to do file transfers between computer across a LAN, but once you hit the WAN your bottleneck is there. That's why the Calypso announcement caught my eye, because Calypso is claiming to widen that bottleneck.

The final misleading bit is that end users somehow "need" these extra speeds. Even the highest videoconferencing application only needs a consistent 768K bit/sec connection, much lower than a T-1 line. For general Internet surfing, a lower connection rate suffices for most users. Now, giving 10 users 768K bit/sec of bandwidth would require a pretty fast connection, which is why Calypso is going after service providers, etc.