June 5, 2001

Waiting on Wi-Fi

M1's pullout doesn't invalidate the promise of the market

JUST between me and you and a dog named, er, Declan, Wi-Fi is going places in more ways than one. Ask Whitney Small, managing director of public relations agency Hoffman Asia Pacific.

While in Korea last week, Ms Small visited Isa-dong, a tourist spot specialising in traditional arts and crafts, and spotted a craftsman doing engravings on keychains and other pieces of metal. A friend who was with her suggested that she get a picture of her dog, Declan, engraved on a keychain. Only problem was, she wasn't carrying a photo of her pet.

On a hunch, they asked the craftsman if he had Internet access; and what do you know, he whipped out a laptop, plugged in a Wi-Fi card, and voila! - high-speed Internet, and no messy wires either. Within minutes, Ms Small had retrieved a photo of Declan from her Yahoo! picture files, and had it engraved on the keychain.

A Hoffman colleague who related this story commented: '(Whitney) said that the juxtaposition between the traditional arts and crafts area with this guy using wireless technology made it all so 'incredible'.'

Indeed. Ms Small's experience is a striking illustration of the possibilities that the technology opens up. Wi-Fi in coffeehouses, airport lounges and offices is the bread and butter, the core part of the industry where growth is likely to be strongest and, importantly, commercially viable applications flourish. But consider, too, the 'champagne and lobster noodles' possibilities: the applications that tweak the imagination, spark a smile, maybe even enrich the human experience.

As the earlier example suggests, the technology opens up possibilities to promote traditional arts and crafts in ingenious ways; imagine, for example, an art auction where the proxies of remote bidders use Wi-Fi enabled laptops equipped with cameras, rather than telephones, to capture the atmosphere for their wealthy clients. Remote bidding, typically by phone currently, will never be the same.

Neither will online education, which is already freeing workers and students from the constraints of time and location. An employee doing an online MBA is now able to log in at her convenience to listen to a world-famous guru who gave a lecture in the US earlier that day. With Wi-Fi, the online student won't even have to stay at one spot, opening up new possibilities for doing science experiments, real-time sociology surveys and so on.

One big advantage of Wi-Fi is the relatively low cost of deploying the technology compared to, say, terrestrial cabling or 3G wireless technology. For social action groups, this could give life to a whole new and potentially enriching range of community projects, whether in poor urban areas or rural villages.

So was Singapore's M1 correct to turn its back - at least for now - on this genuinely exciting area? Clearly, it made a business decision based on its own strategic priorities. IDC's Sandra Ng, for one, can see why M1 decided to go the way it did.

Ms Ng, who is the research group's vice-president of communications and peripherals research for the Asia-Pacific, notes that 'M1's strategy is all about mobility'. In Internet access, Wi-Fi offers portability but limited mobility when compared to 3G, the next-generation mobile phone technology that M1 seems very focused on. And while deploying Wi-Fi will cost far less, it's still unclear how the service and application providers will make money from it, she points out.

But Ms Ng does wonder whether M1 jumped the gun somewhat when it cited customer feedback of its trial service as 'not positive'. It's early days yet, so 'how would customers know?'. People were also sceptical of mobile phones when they first came out, she observes.

The other two telcos, StarHub and SingTel, are forging ahead with their Wi-Fi deployment. But as many have observed, real progress will be hampered by the lack of interoperability between the two offerings in an already small market. That, too, must have surely featured in M1's calculations.

So should the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) step in and mandate agreement, as it has done before in somewhat similar situations? Letting the players themselves make their own agreement is no doubt the best solution. But given the complexities of this particular situation, IDA muscle may be needed to broker such an agreement.

The writer is the BT’s Technology Editor

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