Wi-Fi, WiMAX dead and gone, fibre pundits say

IT'S BEEN a heck of an interesting two days here in Iceland. I've seen some interesting technology, heard some inventive speeches and met some people with different ideas. I head back, however, with questions bubbling in my brain.

The first is the question of the interoperability between wired and wireless technologies for providing broadband. Speaking to various delegates in the fibre industry, they are ramping up for good years ahead. Copper has had its day, and they are starting to lay a new fibre infrastructure. Fibre to the home is the buzzword, and they are expecting it to be the primary distribution method for up to 50 years to come, as there is no other material on the horizon that can offer the bandwidth.

Ask those fibre guys about wireless and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was dead and buried. WiFi is a gimmick, and WiMAX untenable as a robust proposition, they suggest. Besides, those wireless connections have got to terminate to wire at some point, and at that point is going to be fibre.

I'd question that proposition. WiMAX has big backers, and there is no doubt that it can be an alternative, rather than complementary, proposition. Where broadband hits a street, there are two options for service providers. They can wire fibre into every home on that street, or simply stick a wireless access point on the end of the connection and let the houses pick up wirelessly. As WiMAX can extend for tens of kilometres at a time, that's undoubtedly less fibre needed. The providers here don't appear to see that.

The second question is how far the industry appears to be talking among itself. Sure, there are lots of people here from various companies, but some of the biggest players are absent. Whilst the content and the bandwidth infrastructure was debated at length, noticably absent was any discussion of the hardware that consumers will install in their homes, with vague notions of 'set top boxes' raised where necessary. Where is the discussion of the Entertainment PC concept that Intel has been pitching this year as essential for every multimedia home? Sure, video on demand is going to be great for the consumer. But there has been no discussion of how the mechanics of it will work. How will it get from the port in to other displays in the house? What kind of encryption will new offerings carry to enable the kind of scenarios that companies like Microsoft are portraying with Window Media Extenders, where all content is visible anywhere in the home? There was no discussion of this.

Industria demonstrated its MyTV concept, where the bandwidth offered by fibre is harnessed to enable individuals to effectively create their own TV channel. I asked Industria a question as to how on earth it was going to manage this legally. Conceivably, obscene or illegal or inappropriate material could be broadcast by anyone, so who would bear the legal liability for that? The individual doing the broadcasting? The carrier? What guidelines would users have to agree to, and how could those guidelines be reconciled with free speech? I was told that my questions would be answered by speakers later on in the conference, but they weren't. This is an enormous problem that could derail the entire concept, and there is no indication that Industria has really begun to consider this in any depth, meaning that deployment of such systems is sure to be delayed.

There was little discussion of ownership. The content provision industry, as a whole, appears to be moving towards rental as the consumer model of choice, rather than ownership - see Napster and the numerous OD2 services offering all the music you want for a monthly fee, until you stop paying that fee and your music disappears. With the integration of IP and TV platforms, as the delegates here have all been keen to promote, how will that realistically alter the way viewers are fed content? Video on demand is great, but what kind of protection is going to be on that content? Will users be able to record it? If we're suddenly getting music through our TV rather than our computers or hifis, are we going to be able to own what we are streamed?

One absent area of discussion, save for a short mention by one speaker yesterday afternoon, was the convergence of mobile and wired telephony platforms. With mobile companies eager to offer us data, telephone companies eager to offer us broadband and broadband companies eager to offer us telephony, both wired and wireless will offer the same range of data and voice services. How long until we are able to cross content between the two, and how long before mobile companies take bigger stakes in home offerings, and vice versa? Will we see the emergence of a new breed of content provider who will allow its content to move between mobile and home devices, thanks to service agreements that will sit on top of a users agreement between themselves and their home/portable service provider?

The areas for further investigation are many and varied, and you can bet that we'll be looking into them further on the INQ as soon as there are more developments. For now, it's onto a plane and back to Blighty for a decent English pint. µ

Wil Harris edits UK hardware site Bit-Tech