Cellular coverage has traditionally been patchy in indoor environments, which has been an irritant for voice calls and has effectively ruled out data services. Of course, most commercial building have Ethernet cabling widely available for the latter purpose, but even so, in recent years WLAN technology, a.k.a. WiFi, has been creeping in to enable wireless connectivity in areas not covered by the wired network.
WLAN has also been introduced in places like conference centers and staff restaurants, not forgetting the public hotspots that have sprung up in towns and cities, as well as at airports.
The new High Speed Access Point, or AXPT, from the Schaumberg, Illinois-based equipment vendor, enables W-CDMA and HSDPA access (i.e. 3G and 3.5G) via a small access point that can be fixed to a wall in an office, requiring only CAT5 cabling and a power supply. The traffic is then backhauled over IP connection to a concentrator sitting in the mobile operator’s network, which can handle thousands of the APs, according to Tom Quirke, Motorola’s director of GSM marketing.
The product will only be marketed to mobile operators, i.e. companies won’t be able to go out and buy them themselves, and for this same reason, Motorola isn’t going public with pricing for the AXPT.
Furthermore, since the AP will only be available through an operator, it might strengthen the latter’s argument for an enterprise to standardize on a single mobile operator, whereas at the moment the decision which provider to go with is left up to the individual employee, even though part of his or her usage is for business. One can imagine a role for the device in large indoor environments such as shopping malls, too.
As for the coverage, Quirke said Motorola’s tests show the AXPT having twice the range for the same amount of power as a standard WiFi access point, the reason being that the nature of the technology involves designing to sit in a bigger cell.
The launch, which will see the device demo’ed at the 3GSM event in Barcelona, Spain next month, comes as carriers are revving up to deliver 3.5G services, whether HSDPA or, in the CDMA world, EV-DO. Several have announced plans to sell laptop computers with chips to connect to their networks already embedded in them, removing WiFi’s bragging rights of being able to connect as soon as the machine is opened.
Motorola clearly believes that giving the operators the ability to compete with WiFi indoors is a worthwhile exercise, so much so that last month it invested, via its VC arm, in Spotwave Wireless, a Canadian developer of indoor cellular AP technology.
It will be interesting to see whether Motorola adds more features into the AXPT. For instance, it would presumably be advantageous to have a CDMA2000/EV-DO version to offer to the likes of Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS. One wonders whether it might not be possible to PoE-enable deployments of the AXPT in order to obviate the need to pull an additional power cable.
