European Union applies WiFi pressure

ACKNOWLEDGING THAT the European Union is supposed to represent a single market, the European Commission is set to apply pressure on five member countries over the provision of public 'Wi-Fi' networks. According to a report in today's Financial Times, the countries are Italy, Luxembourg, Greece, Spain and France.

Public 'hot spot' networks utilise 802.11b technology, popularly known as Wi-Fi, and operate at 2.4 GHz - a frequency globally accepted as 'licence-free'.

However, we've previously seen bizarre manoeuvrings whereby France has hosted an international conference on Bluetooth (which also utilises 2.4 GHz) and been forced to provide temporary permission for suppliers to demonstrate their products while simultaneously prohibiting general use of that frequency because it might interfere with its own military radio networks.

By contrast to the naughty five countries, the UK and Germany have been much more liberal with the British government giving permission to companies like BT Retail to operate its commercial 'Openzone' service from August 1st .

The Commission is apparently flexing its muscles in a run up to July 2003 when it will acquire powers to overrule individual national telecoms regulators if they seek to unfairly restrict specific technologies.

The UK is currently in a state of confusion over the use of Wi-Fi5/802.11a (54 Mbit/s) products which are allowed only a temporary licence by the Radiocommunications Agency (RA).

The licences are only temporary because there's still no finalised European standard for 5.1 GHz networking for the RA to enforce, although it's supposed to be HiperLAN/2. µ