The Marriage of 3G and Wi-Fi

US : There is a powerful trend toward seamless mobility in the wireless industry, where mobile professionals today and eventually all consumers in the future will want to communicate and be able to do their daily business anytime, anywhere. As a result, there is real demand for ubiquitous connectivity between a wide variety of mobile devices and access technologies, which, at least for now, include wireless wide-area networks (WWANs) and wireless local-area networks (WLANs). Roaming and communications between these technologies are therefore "must-haves" for seamless mobility to occur.

According to Seamless Mobility: The Marriage of 3G and Wi-Fi, recently published by the International Engineering Consortium, to realize the potential of seamless mobility and ensure continued profitability, service providers must focus as much on WLAN implementations as on that of cellular WWANs. Wi-Fi and traditional wireless services are adjuncts that can exist and succeed together to provide consumers what they want, when they want it.

"The wireless network of the future will be a hybrid of 2G/2.5G/3G/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/UWB technologies with roaming/billing systems that provide the bridge. The day is just around the corner where there will be contiguous Wi-Fi coverage in dense metro areas and 2.5G or 3G in more outlying areas. Service providers will derive their revenues through guaranteed service levels and content," says the author of Seamless Mobility, Goli Ameri, founder and president of eTinium, a telecom consulting and market research firm specializing in wireless technologies.

Seamless Mobility details how customers will use these technologies for different reasons and at different times. The 2.5G and 3G technologies such as general packet radio service (GPRS), enhanced data rates for GSM evolution (EDGE), code division multiple access (CDMA) 1XRTT, and CDMA 1xEV-DO will be used for applications requiring instant gratification and bursty data: e-mail, calendar access, text messaging, and multimedia message service (MMS), among others. But WLANs will be used in specific locations where users need access to their corporate files and intranets.

Seamless Mobility is the result of extensive primary and secondary research on service providers (U.S. and international), equipment vendors, wireless Internet service providers, semiconductor manufacturers, software providers, and aggregators, among others. The study highlights the potential as well as the shortcomings of 3G and demonstrates how service providers can take advantage of WLAN deployments to make up for 3G's revenue shortfall and what strategic moves are required for success in mobile data. Drivers and obstacles that must be addressed to achieve growth in the WLAN market--such as roaming, billing, security, seamless authentication, and handovers--are pinpointed. In addition, the study examines the business models of failed companies and offers lessons learned to build successful business models.