Wireless turns inside out

Cellular networks were originally built to keep people connected when away from their wired indoor phones. For its part, Wi-Fi's genesis was to eliminate cabling to desktop PCs, then later to provide data mobility in and around the home and office. Now, the respective technologies' goals are flip-flopping. Cellular is doing its darnedest to affordably cover indoor locations, while Wi-Fi is making a hard push outside. What gives?

In-Stat predicts a Wi-Fi hotspot revival with 47% increased usage this year. Partial contributors to this expected growth are efforts by Wi-Fi companies such as Ruckus Wireless (most recently), Motorola, Proxim and others to create outdoor Wi-Fi mesh networks complete with wireless backhaul and unified indoor/outdoor management.

These companies are aiming their indoor/outdoor Wi-Fi packages of components, in part, toward a certain class of service provider that wishes to deliver broadband wireless access to pockets of users at a low, incremental cost. Unlicensed Wi-Fi is making an outdoor comeback as a more affordable way to incrementally grow broadband wireless access networks in emerging markets, rural areas and multitenant buildings and campuses, compared to the hefty top-down investments needed to get 3G/4G networks up and running.

As for cellular, who can really blame the carriers for suboptimal indoor coverage and signal strength? The initial presumption was that everyone already had an indoor, wired phone. So the demand was for dial tone outside, when you were away from that phone or didn't have enough nickels in your pocket to use a payphone (should you be able to find one).

Now, people are so accustomed to using wireless phones as their primary phones that they want them to work indoors and out. Indoor base stations and distributed antenna systems (DAS) achieve this goal in very large companies. And the DAS companies such as ADC, InnerWireless and MobileAccess turned a corner a couple years ago when they built “neutral-host" systems -- those that will distribute signals from multiple frequencies, thereby not requiring multiple, expensive DAS overlays if companies want to support multiple carriers' networks indoors.

And there are still more recent moves to lessen the burden of bringing cellular indoors:

* DAS vendor MobileAccess launched its EnCOVER VE, which has already been shipping in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, in the United States last week. The DAS allows enterprises to connect antennas to existing Ethernet cabling plants without eating into network bandwidth, which should cut DAS costs by 45% to 50%, the company says.

* The MobileAccess approach is reminiscent of the new Enterprise Radio Access Network recently announced by start-up SpiderCloud Wireless, which also leverages the internal Ethernet for signal distribution.

* Then there is the femtocell camp. Airvana last week announced an enterprise-class femtocell called HubBub UMTS High-Capacity Femtocell, which it says supports 16 simultaneous users, 21.6Mbps download and 5.7Mbps upload speeds with a coverage range of up to 600 meters. It joins competitor Ubiquisys in the enterprise-class femto market.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.