Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Tuesday December 14, 2004

[ Networks ] WLAN and 3G

Earlier, I've written about the interplay of WiFi and cellular networking, looking at various contexts. The relatioship between these two different modes of networking has significance for device vendors, network equipment providers, operators and consumers.

Device vendors look to bring devices that can be endpoints in both types of networks, NEPs want to apply their cellular and mobile network expertise to Wireless LAN (WLAN), operators are trying to better understand the business model and be open and willing to provide better and more integrated service across both networks, and subscribers want good, seamless service with predictable behavior on both.

WiFi (.5 to 1 Megabits) and 3G (.1 to .5 Megabits) networks will likely remain good compliments of each other for some time to come, The Wall Street Journal¹ reports. This trend is also evidenced by what operators as well as the network equipment providers have done in the last couple of years.

For example, "T-Mobile, a unit of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG, recently signed a so-called roaming agreement with BT Group PLC of London. Customers of either company can now use 10,500 hot spots in hundreds of cities and towns in Europe and the U.S. Meanwhile, BT recently announced new roaming agreements that give its customers access to 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots across 11 countries."¹

What is of greater interest remains how to better take advantage of parallel deployments of cellular and WLAN networks.

This challenge will have to be answered by those who have developed great expertise in the area of cellular networks, say, for example, Ericsson. One of Ericsson's important areas of core competence, in my opinion, covers cell-to-cell handoff as well as roaming across public land mobile networks². It should be a very easy move by Ericsson to bring those competencies to WLAN networks. It should literally be just a matter of deciding to do it.

This Monday, for example, Ericsson announced it has joined the WiMax Forum: "WiMAX ensures interoperability of the open IEEE 802.16 standard for broadband wireless access. It is a natural part of an operator's Ethernet broadband offering and can also serve as transmission backhaul," said Karl Thedeen, vice president, product area wireline at Ericsson.

[1] See here, for The WSJ report published on December 13, 2004. Registration, subscription or 1-time-payment may be necessary depending on time and mode of access to Dow Jones publications such as The Wall Street Journal.
[2] See Gunnar Heine's excellent book GSM Networks: Protocols, Terminology, and Implementation on hand-off and roaming in GSM networks.

2004-12-14 22:44:42.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Technology ] Software -- Enterprise SOA

This evening, while waiting for my daughter to finish with her violin rehearsal in Palo Alto, I ran into and spent a couple of fruitful hours with a very good book on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) written by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke and Dirk Slama: Enterprise SOA (2005).
The book is quite comprehensive on a wide range of topics, has a good overview of SOA and related issues and finishes with a number of important case studies worked out in some detail.
The authors, based in Germany, maintain a web site associated with the book: www.enterprise-soa.com.
This would be a good book to have on your shelves if you're doing SOA-related work.