IP steals wireless show: CDMA Americas Congress hammers out data dilemmas

The integration of the Internet and wireless is a little like Elvis meeting the Queen mum. They don't mix easily.

That was the story emerging from last week's 1999 CDMA Americas Congress in San Francisco. Instead of spurring the pep rally that typically occurs at single-technology shows, the conference was all about data. Speakers came from both wireless and Internet camps and discussed everything from implementing end-to-end IP networks to strategies for encouraging increased application development. The experience demonstrated how much the two communities still need to learn from each other.

"There is a huge disconnect of personalities," said John Yuzdepski, vice president of product management and development for Sprint PCS, which has worked closely with Yahoo! and other information sources to deliver content to users of its Wireless Web service.

Internet and wireless companies have different concepts of quality of service and must reach a middle ground to reach service level agreements, he said. While the telecom world often has high expectations, Internet application developers are used to encountering problems - and are content to accept them, Yuzdepski said.

"It was tough to learn how to work with telcos," said Mohan Vishwanath, vice president of Yahoo! Everywhere.

The companies also have encountered some challenges in handling the delicate matter of owning customers. "It gets sticky when you encroach on each other's space," Yuzdepski said.

Yahoo! and Sprint PCS have a tight agreement, he said, which starts with co-branding of the initial Web site that customers visit and limits their access to other Yahoo! branded sites. Neither company owns the customer, Vishwanath said, but Sprint PCS appears to believe otherwise and is keeping a close eye on the customer relationship.

Beyond working through relationships with application and service providers, wireless operators are adapting to dealing with IP infrastructure vendors. IP equipment must evolve to the quality standards of the wireless world. Sun Microsystems, which has a partnership with Motorola and announced a new partnership with Lucent Technologies last week, admits that its telecom customers are "a notch up" when it comes to reliability requirements, said David Douglas, chief technology officer for Sun's network service provider division (see story on page 12).

The wireless industry's high standards for quality are necessary in a hierarchical network architecture because if one piece of the chain fails, so does everything under it. The distributed IP architecture allows for more error in components. "The network can be less robust, but because it's meshed, the traffic gets through," said Hermon Pon, vice president of technology and chief technical officer for Nortel Networks.

Nortel is conducting a pure packet network trial with Vodafone AirTouch in the U.S. Vodafone AirTouch challenged Nortel to reduce the cost of delivering a megabit from 37cents to 1cent. Nortel has gotten the price as low as 4cents, Pon said.

The wireless and Internet worlds also must adapt their very different perceptions of capacity. While bandwidth virtually is unlimited in the Internet world, it's a scarce and valuable resource for wireless players. Motorola and Cisco Systems, via their partnership, reduce packet sizes and traffic. The companies currently are working with standards bodies to standardize the process.

The transition to IP networks may help the wireless community imitate one area where it has a lot to learn: speedy application development. A distributed IP architecture separates the transport control, call control and feature processing, which are tied together in a "hairball of elements" in today's wireless networks, said Maureen Govern, vice president of network architecture and technology for Motorola. Separating those functions allows third parties to easily develop applications for the networks.

Regardless of the differences between the Internet and wireless worlds, the interest from the Internet side signifies even more rapid wireless growth for the future. "Wireless access is the next big wave," Vishwanath said. "We think phones will be the dominant non-PC device."