Publication Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Guest Opinion: Is ‘wireless’ a substitute for fiber Internet access?
Guest Opinion: Is ‘wireless’ a substitute for fiber Internet access?
(December 14, 2005) by Jeff Hoel
There is a saying: If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.
Provo, Utah, knows where it's going. So do the 14 cities that comprise the UTOPIA consortium. So does Loma Linda, California.
These communities are implementing municipal telecom systems that use so-called fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology, which usually also includes small businesses (big businesses and universities long ago went to fiber).
And these communities are not adopting just any FTTH technology. Each subscribing home or business gets its own fiber (to the substation), so it doesn't have to share bandwidth with its neighbors. Link speeds are at least 100 megabits per second (Mb/s), but demanding subscribers can upgrade to 1 gigabit per second (Gb/s) without requiring neighbors to upgrade.
The optronics equipment is standards-based and interoperable, and available from multiple vendors. All services are delivered using Internet Protocol (IP), a standard for Web access.
And the system is "open access," meaning that retail service providers can use the community's FTTH system to deliver retail services to subscribers.
Other communities are choosing to implement municipal telecom systems using wireless technologies because the infrastructure costs less than FTTH and can be deployed more rapidly.
Recent news reports that Google is planning to implement a community-wide Wi-Fi system in Mountain View has sparked interest in how wireless differs from fiber.
But wireless technology is no substitute for fiber -- because it's much slower, less reliable, less secure and shared.
Actually, wireless is much, much slower than FTTH. Wi-Fi 802.11b is specified at 11 Mb/s, but effective available bandwidth is about half that or less -- and this bandwidth in general has to be shared among multiple users. WiMAX claims bandwidths up to 70 Mb/s and coverage areas up to 30 miles in radius, but, again, the bandwidth is shared among multiple users -- the more users, the less bandwidth available per user.
Furthermore, in the case of wireless that uses unlicensed spectrum, bandwidth must be shared not only among users within the community's system but among any other users who ask to use the same spectrum. A community could acquire licensed spectrum, but that would be expensive.
A major, continuing concern is that wireless is inherently less secure than FTTH.
Wireless transmissions are more susceptible to being “sniffed” -- intercepted and copied for later analysis.
It may be possible to minimize this security disadvantage by using encryption techniques, but this further reduces throughput, which is already limited.
There are many wireless standards, and choosing the best one is an issue. Wi-Fi 802.11b is popular today, but is quite slow. Wi-Fi 802.11g is faster. Wi-Fi 802.11n (not yet a standard) is faster still. Wi-Fi 802.11g can optionally communicate with Wi-Fi 802.11b devices, but only at 802.11b speeds. So if a community decides to upgrade from 802.11b to 802.11g, should it force all users to upgrade, to get best performance, or remain backward-compatible with 802.11b?
Wireless coverage can be an issue, particularly indoors, although users can buy special equipment to mitigate the problem.
How wireless access points are interconnected is important. For best performance, each wireless access point could be connected to a fiber network, but the cost of such a fiber network, though less than the cost of FTTH, would be significant. Alternatively, wireless access points can be interconnected wirelessly as a "mesh" network, so that messages might take several wireless hops to reach a fiber-backbone network.
A Wi-Fi standard for how "mesh" should work, 802.11s, is in development, but existing products are not standardized or interoperable.
Opponents of municipally owned fiber systems sometimes say that the only application that requires FTTH speeds is television. That's just nonsense. If your job requires working with large amounts of data, telecommuting might require fiber speeds, dependability and security.
If you have a home business (an increasing phenomenon in the Palo Alto area), or if you host a Web site, high speed is an advantage -- sometimes essential. Even low- bandwidth applications such as voice transmission over the Internet (VoIP) work better on fiber because it provides reliable, predictable bandwidth.
For mobile applications, of course, wireless is better. So if a community wants to offer wireless in addition to FTTH, in order to support mobile applications, that's fine. A citywide fiber infrastructure makes an excellent backbone for wireless.
Jeff Hoel, a retired chip designer, moved to Palo Alto in 1998 partly because FTTH was “just around the corner.” He can be e-mailed at jeff_hoel@yahoo.com.
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