Movers and shakers >BY DAN O'SHEA, Technology Editor >TX Mergers. Aquisitions. Alliances. Partnerships. Strategic Maneuvering. Upheaval. Are we talking about the telecommunications industry's titans? Bell Atlantic, SBC Communications, Sprint PCS or Tele-

To industry visionaries, a wireless utopia will be represented by cohabitation of voice, data and video throughout the spectrum. Bureaucratic haggles and real-world market constraints are certain to delay that reality, but research from the Bell Labs arm of Lucent Technologies is helping advance the pace of technological development.

With the help of Sun Microsystems, Bell Labs has developed a prototype wireless local area network that uses asynchronous transfer mode as a transmission engine. The research is part of the Mobile Information Infrastructure program, a project administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and partially funded by the U.S. government's Advanced Technology Program.

The Bell Labs prototype links mobile laptop computers to ATM LANs via 10 Mb/s infrared links and compact, portable base stations (see figure). That link allows for low-overhead, single-cell ATM transmission of MPEG 2 video and Internet content, according to Bell Labs.

In addition to LAN-based service goals, the researchers hope to eventually crack the public network environment by creating a cellular-like system with bandwidth capabilities that outstrip those available from current wireless broadband methods.

"We're talking about a new type of broadband cellular network," said Kai Eng, director of Bell Labs' broadband systems research department. "We're doing it step by step.

One of the steps still to be surmounted is replacing the infrared links with radios, effectively eliminating line-of-sight limitations that would prohibit wide area implementation. "It turns out that it takes longer to build a radio than an infrared link," he said.

Eng is quick to issue the caveat that this prototype is still in the research stage and that no promises are being made about commercial performance. But he can't entirely mask his scientist's zeal.

"From a research viewpoint, I believe all the technologies needed for such a system will be developed for commercial deployment within a few years," Eng said. "From a technology viewpoint, there's no reason this could not be ready.

One wireless analyst agrees that the technology could be ready but thinks the world might not be.

"From the technology perspective, they're definitely headed in the right direction," said Virginia Brooks, director of network research at The Aberdeen Group, Boston. "But I have some questions from the marketing and deployment end.

Those questions are mainly bureaucracy-related and include whether the resulting system would be designed for licensed or unlicensed spectrum. In the public network scenario, she pointed to the issue of facilities siting and its associated haggles as examples.

Eng said Bell Labs is considering many spectrum scenarios, including the 800 MHz, 2 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The question of licensing could be determined by the specific application, he said. "If you're talking about a wide area infrastructure, you would not deploy it in an unlicensed band," Eng said. "If you were setting up a wireless LAN in your office, it wouldn't matter whether it was licensed.

In theory-which is still the category for this technology-Brooks agreed that broadband transmission via ATM does represent a move toward the wireless ideal. "Having this kind of technology-provided it's easy to deploy and manage-would be a big boost for wireless in general," she said.

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