Posted: 18th Mar, 2003 By: MarkJ
Roaming between broadband wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) Hotspots, be it with a mobile phone or laptop, is still someway off.
The Gartner research group believes that it'll be a while before technology and business models allow users to get wireless access wherever they need it:
In reality, wireless LAN (WLAN) hot spots in many cities are a patchy network without a common billing system or access settings.
"The biggest challenge is user convenience -- how to make it make it easy for people to get ubiquitous access while having to deal with only one provider," said Robin Simpson, Gartner Australasia's research director for mobile and wireless. "Currently, business processes and interoperability agreements between different wireless hot spot providers are not defined."
That users can't roam seamlessly between hot spots is a huge obstacle to the widespread adoption of mobile computing, one that stands between Intel and billions in unrealised revenue in the chips that power wireless computers.Despite the problems, a strong growth in Wi-Fi hardware sales combined with greater coverage will invariably mean better networks and cheaper access.
Over time it's hoped that this boom, which is likely to hit between 2005 and 2007, will result in improved 'roaming' capabilities. More @
ZDNet.