Murray Hill, N.J.’s Lucent Technologies Wednesday plans to
demonstrate a further step in what some wireless industry watchers consider
the Holy Grail of wireless data networking: seamless roaming.
At the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) Wireless
IT and Internet show in Las Vegas Wednesday, Lucent said it will
demonstrate seamless switching of laptop data calls between an 802.11b
Lucent made a similar demonstration in September, when it showed off a
seamless handoff of a wireless data call from an 802.11b WLAN to a 3G UMTS
The idea is relatively simple: to give mobile workers the ability to remain
connected without having to re-establish secure IP sessions each time they
move from a WLAN to a wide area network (WAN) and back again. For instance,
an IT field service engineer could begin downloading large files like
technical schematics from a WLAN at a dispatch center, and continue to
receive the information while en-route to a service call.
Maria Palamara, offer director for the Mobility Solutions Group at Lucent,
told internetnews.com Tuesday that she sees the technology first
catching on for vertical applications. For instance, public safety workers
like police and emergency services responders could leverage fixed wireless
networks on premises and mobile wireless networks off-premises without
having to re-establish secure IP sessions each time they move.
“As PDAs become more the norm for business-type users, we’ll see this type
of seamless interaction take a more horizontal approach,” Palamara said.
But she also noted that Lucent has not yet commercialized the technology,
But it is unlikely that carriers will be able to do it alone, Palamara
“We’ll see a lot of these roaming agreements happening over the next few
The demonstration Wednesday will utilize a 1xEV-DO network. CDMA2000
Lucent began offering 1xEV-DO equipment commercially in June, and Verizon
In addition, Lucent’s demonstration will utilize a laptop equipped with a
The ipUnplugged Roaming Gateway handles the actual handoff. It supports VPN
as carriers and WLAN operators are only beginning to test the waters,
though some, like Sprint , are ready to call it the future
of wireless.
“Companies that take a more integrated approach to meet customer demand
will outlive their competitors,” Sprint Chairman and CEO William Esrey
declared at InternetWorld Fall 2002 early in October. “Total access
solutions is where the industry is going, and, more importantly, where it
needs to go. The desire for one-stop shopping and end-to-end services will
grow.”
said. Instead, she foresees a surge in roaming agreements, as carriers
strike deals with WLAN hotspot providers in order to provide the seamless
roaming experience. In such a scenario, wireless carriers would become
managers of wireless services. The carriers would forge agreements with
hotspot providers, but such deals would be transparent to the end-users,
with all bills coming through their carriers of choice.
months, is my expectation,” Palamara said. “There’s still a lot of
uncertainty in the industry as to which wireless LANs are going to support
roaming agreements.” Still, she noted that hotspot providers want traffic,
which would make deals with carriers potentially very attractive.
1xEV-DO (the EV stands for evolution, while DO stands for data optimized)
is a step up from the CDMA2000 1xRTT technology most U.S. carriers have
deployed currently.
Wireless already uses the technology as the infrastructure behind its
Express Network. The technology gives mobile operators the ability to offer
always-on mobile data services at speeds of up to 2.4 mbps.
Sierra Wireless AirCard (a wide-area wireless PC card), a Proxim Orinoco
802.11 WLAN card, and ipUnplugged’s Seamless Roaming Gateway solution. The
enabling technology behind it all is Mobile IP, an Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) standard which allows the seamless inter-technology
handoff between 802.11 and 3G technologies.
connectivity between sites and filtering of service requests for individual
users based on a service profile. It can also use legacy authentication
servers.
