Industry is Drunk on Wi-Fi Kool-Aid

Despite all logic to the contrary (and the ramblings of yours truly) the hype surrounding the impending replacement of the global carrier wireless network by WiFi is approaching hysteria.

The success of WiFi as a replacement, or even a successful augmentation to, the existing mobile voice network is hinged on three things:

1) Battery Life -- mobile phones don't pack enough oomph to do WiFi which, strangely enough, wasn't really designed with mobile devices in mind. Fixing this will likely require bending the laws of physics but if it works we'll all be driving electric cars that go 400km on a 3-hour charge.

2) Ubiquitous Availability -- WiFi compromises signal propagation for speed... it's built into the design. Getting WiFi through walls, past metal objects, and beyond 50 feet from the radio isn't really that easy. Doing it in a mesh is even harder, and doing it in areas where every Tom, Dick, and Harry already has their own LinkSys gateway is damned near impossible.

3) Mobility -- One of the most difficult engineering problems in building mobile voice networks is tower-hopping, or the process of handing an in-process call from one radio to the next. Some effort has gone toward this, however the design of the radio is an obstacle, the fact that one's IP address will change is a huge barrier, and the difficulty of maintaining the stream during the cut-over is not to be underestimated.

Hey, look... I would be the first guy to fall all over myself if this could work. But VERY few writers and thinkers, with the exception of folks like Owen Linderholm, are willing to acknowledge the myriad problems plaguing municipal WiFi, especially in the mobility context.

So I'll be waiting to buy my Quad-Band phone, thanks..

-Ian.