Posted Sunday, April 6, 2003; 17:21 BST
There are a few drawbacks to Wi-Fi. Operators that charge for the service, like T-Mobile, aren't making it cheap to use. Logging onto T-Mobile's Wi-Fi network at the Starbucks at Hackesche Markt in downtown Berlin is easy with a laptop and a credit card. Within minutes any road warrior can sign up, pay and be off surfing at 11 mbps, fast enough to watch the new Tomb Raider trailer. But the cost — starting at €7.95 for one hour — discourages regular use. Another problem with laptops is that Wi-Fi sucks the juice out the battery faster than you can say MP3. It's possible to configure the laptop to use less power, but the industry recognizes this as a big problem, especially when Wi-Fi moves to cell phones.

The coverage in hot spots is also small; leave the café and your connection dries up. And the hot spots can be hard to find in the first place, though that's getting easier thanks to companies like Boingo Wireless of the U.S. Boingo has what it calls "sniffer" software that detects which Wi-Fi networks are on and whether the operator charges, and then allows the user to choose which network to log onto. The WiFinder website (www.wifinder.com) is another option. The site has a search engine that locates hot spots worldwide by city or country. But it's far from perfect. A search turned up 37 listings for Berlin, but some of them were actually in Hamburg. WiFinder has a few bugs to work out before the IPO.

The biggest criticism of Wi-Fi has been that it's not robust enough to replace sturdy always-on data networks like GPRS and 3G. But WAN International, based in Halden, Norway, may be debunking this assumption. Instead of setting up isolated hot spots, WAN is building what it calls Wi-Fi "zones," the largest of which has a radius of 12 km. WAN has built its own radio antennas to transmit Wi-Fi signals over long distances, allowing users to move between local Wi-Fi networks and wide area networks. Bjorn Eilertsen, WAN's ceo, says the Wi-Fi networks in Halden cover 65% of the city. Networks are also under construction in Oslo, Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg.

Five telecommunications operators in the Asia-Pacific region have joined together to create a similar long-distance Wi-Fi network. The Wireless Broadband Alliance — made up of Korea Telecom, China Netcom, Maxis, StarHub and Telstra — is developing and marketing Wi-Fi services in Korea, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. The goal is to expand the base of 8,600 hot spots to more than 20,000 by the end of the year. With that kind of coverage, Wi-Fi is no longer a niche technology, but a fast, always-on network that could siphon off a significant amount of revenue operators had hoped to use to refinance the huge investment in gprs and 3G.

It's too late for cellular operators to stop Wi-Fi, says Scott Rafer, the WiFinder chairman. "People in Europe are waiting for T-Mobile and Vodafone to get more active," he says. "Wi-Fi isn't going to replace GPRS and 3G, but it's going to make them a vast amount cheaper." Cheap, convenient wireless Internet access sounds great. If Wi-Fi hot spots really do merge into zones, it's a good bet that consumers will soon be flooding them.

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