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Wireless Internet Finally Coming To London
andylaurence writes: "NTL has issued a statement on their site of their intentions to trial highspeed wireless Internet access in London. They don't seem to know whether it will continue after the trial, but they have stated that it will cost £25 a month (the same as their cable modems). One would assume that this will be based on an 802.11b network, and the questions will then arise as to how secure this is. Another company also seem to be pioneering wireless Internet access this month, with a trial due to start soon. Seems to me like this might just take off." Wait -- I thought London already had wireless access.
See http://www.radio.gov.uk/publication/press/2000/20o ct00.htm for the spectrum (10 GHz) used by NTL - this rules out 802.11b, which works at 2.4 GHz only.
/ broadband_ovum.html
They are using some variant of 'fixed wireless', also known as wireless local loop (WLL) - this is intended only to serve fixed sites, as the name implies, and uses a variety of spectrum from 2 GHz up to 30+ GHz - these technologies go by various names including MMDS and LMDS.
The good news is that this is licensed spectrum, so performance is determined by the network operator, not by the number of people near you with wireless LANs, and coverage is generally much better (802.11b would be quite an expensive way to try to cover a whole city).
Fixed wireless access (FWA) is already being deployed by various operators in the US (Sprint, Worldcom) and UK (Tele2, around Reading). It has a chequered history with various bankruptcies (Teligent in the US, Ionica in the UK), but if the costs come down and standards are agreed, it could be a useful competitor to Cable and xDSL, particularly for areas they don't address (e.g. industrial/business areas, and rural areas).
For more information, see http://www.watmag.com/technologies/Broadband/ovum