Hitting top speed on the wireless web

By PETER GRIFFIN

Imagine this. Melting into the couch after a hard day at the office, laptop perched on your knee, wireless modem blinking away in the background.

You do a spot of high-speed surfing as you take in the 6pm news on TV: perhaps downloading replays of the day's Louis Vuitton racing at Virtual Spectator or fuller coverage of a business news story at CNN Money. You could also pay some bills while you're at it at eBill.

No wires to keep you circling the phone jack. Just a single cable connecting the modem to your laptop - and download speeds you would enjoy at the office.

Until now, that's something that only people with their own wireless local area networks (LANs) could enjoy.

New Zealanders never really bought into the wireless hype that engulfed other parts of the world because there was never really anything compellingly wireless on offer.

That is changing now. Telecom's mobile network delivers data download speeds bettering dial-up internet accounts, and there are enough mobile phones and modem cards on the market to support the service properly.

Taking a divergent path and providing much of the buzz is Walker Wireless, which is testing modems from US company IP Wireless to deliver higher speeds on a potentially more generous data model.

Having used the modems as part of the Walker Wireless "Ultamo" trial for the past few weeks, as well as Mobile Jetstream, we've had a good taste of high-speed internet that comes with the advantage of mobility.

We tried three levels of service with Walker Wireless - 128Kbps, 256Kbps and 512Kbps, all of which delivered respectable speed benchmarks in their ranges.

Easy to self-install, the modems themselves are stylish, sturdy and feature a neat display to signal download in progress.

The coverage is reliable, day or night, rain or shine: our connection rarely dropped out as long as we stayed within the trial area (my home in Ponsonby was, sadly, out of zone). Still, there were a few design flaws IP Wireless would do well to address for the next batch of modems.

While not as easy to take with you as the Mobile Jetstream devices, there are plans for a PC card version of the Walker Wireless modems which will mean the ultimate in high-speed internet on the move.

The modems will also support voice telephony, hinting at the possibility of being able to drop your Telecom phone line to do all communicating via your wireless modem.

Phoning up the web


Then there's the other way of doing things - Telecom's Mobile Jetstream. On its own, the Kyocera 2235 mobile phone ($449 on a MyTime 200 12-month contract) will let you do more than call up your buddies.

Check your email if you have an account with internet provider Xtra, visit WAP (wireless application protocol) sites, get news updates or find out what movies are showing. But a cheap wireless data cable converts the phone into a modem that will give you download speeds on a par with a fixed-line Jetstart connection (70Kbps to 90Kbps on average), but on a very different pricing scheme (see below).

The phone is easy to set up for internet access and comes with Down2Home, metering software that lets you see how much data you are using in real-time. Good battery life will allow extended surfing, if you can afford the viciously metered data charges.

A smoother if more expensive option for the laptop user is a wireless CDMA card, such as the Gtran DotSurfer, which Telecom is now selling. A breeze to set up and fitting into a standard PC Card slot, it's like building the Kyocera phone into your PC.

The Gtran card comes with a nice interface for connecting to the web and sending SMS text messages from the keyboard of your laptop, a nice alternative to fiddling with the cramped pinpad of a mobile phone.

How does it all work?

At the moment the Ultamo trial is reaching a sizeable chunk of Auckland using just five mobile base stations, the main one perched on top of the Royal & SunAlliance tower in Auckland's central business district. But Walker Wireless promises it can quickly increase the number of base stations to cover Greater Auckland.

Its tie-up with Vodafone will allow it to use the mobile player's national network of cellphone towers to hang its equipment from. Walker Wireless is running the service over frequencies in the 2.1GHz (gigahertz) range using radio spectrum bought in Government-run spectrum auctions.

Built into the IP Wireless modems, says Walker Wireless, is technology that sends data in an extra-efficient method that does not require the user to be in "line-of-sight" with the nearest base station. That's something we can vouch for. Dips in terrain, office walls and overgrowth did not hinder the modem.

Mobile Jetstream, on the other hand, is based on Telecom's CDMA mobile network, which has just received a major tweak to allow for high data speeds.

Coverage was generally seamless. You don't expect your mobile phone to cut out regularly these days and neither will the Kyocera modem or Gtran card if you're in a reasonable coverage zone.

Fixing the alternative


These days Web access is not a problem for most people.

Dial-up internet is slower than we'd like, but it's cheap - you're probably paying about $28 a month for flat rate, unmetered internet access.

Some 26,000 Kiwis have opted for a faster connection at home in the form of Telecom's JetLine or Jetstream accounts. The former delivers speeds of 128Kbps but Jetstream provides speeds of 1Mbps to 2Mbps.

But you'll have to pay for the luxury of the extra speed, $65 for JetStream Starter with a 5GB download cap, and $89 For Jetstream Home with a 1GB cap after which you pay 20c for every extra megabyte downloaded. On a regular day installation will set you back $248.

Where the new wireless services come into their own is their portability.

Jetstart and Jetstream free up your telephone line, but still leave you dependent on the piece of copper snaking into your house from the street.

Just how much you need or want to break free from the restrictions of being able to surf the web only from set locations will determine how soon you dip your toe in wireless waters.

Dollars and cents

It is difficult to do a comparison of Ultamo and Mobile Jetstream based on price, because Walker Wireless hasn't yet released pricing details for when its service goes commercial.

But the company says it will be roughly the same price as Jetstream, the fixed-line flavour, with similar expectations in terms of the data caps with which consumers can expect to have to live.

With Walker Wireless introducing a wireless service with fixed-line pricing, Telecom's data plans for Mobile Jetstream could soon look exorbitant.

A session of web surfing using the Gtran Dotsurfer card notched up downloads of 18 megabytes, that included a freeware download from Tucows, some simple web browsing and half an hour of streaming audio from rock haven KNAC.

All up, an entertaining way to kill an hour but relatively conservative internet usage by most standards. That little session would cost me a massive $144 on a casual data plan from Telecom. Even a medium use account would see me eat up my entire 12MB data cap ($25) and face an additional charge of $36.

Accessing the internet through the Kyocera phone and data cable to send some emails through a web browser based internet account included total data downloads of 250KB.

Now we're looking at $2 on a casual data plan, reasonable if you keep data usage low.

Data plans aside, you have to equip yourself with the right hardware.

The Walker Wireless modems cost about $550; a GTran DotSurfer card will cost more than $1100 and Mobile Jetstream capable phones will cost upwards of $400.

Weighing up the options


Telecom with Mobile Jetstream will ultimately go head to head with the Vodafone/Walker Wireless wireless data products.

Some unique selling points separate each of the wireless line-ups.

Walker Wireless is for the businessperson who is moving from office desk to home. At home, the businessperson wants to be able to jump out to the Web quickly and not sacrifice speed.

Mobile Jetstream is for the so-called corridor warrior, the mobile worker needing to get low levels of data - email or sales data - back to the office quickly from the road.

While Walker Wireless gets its national footprint started, Mobile Jetstream will have the upper hand on coverage. Common to all users is the mobile work tool of choice - the laptop. You'll need one of those pricy devices too.

Walker Wireless

Telecom

Vodafone

RoamAD

Bandwidth Place

PC Pitstop

Virtual Spectator

CNN Money

eBill

Tucows

KNAC