The world can't get enough wireless. Canada's Research in Motion has put a whole desktop of communication in anybody's pocket. In California, rental cars now have optional high-speed Internet service. In Finland, cell phones unlock public washrooms.
Less-developed countries have jumped straight to wireless telephone systems, putting untold millions in touch for the first time, while the developed world keeps pushing at the unconnected envelope, wirelessly supporting everything from law enforcement and disaster management to social networking and e-commerce.
Of course, technology that grows this fast leaves gaps in coverage. Wireless now needs to offer lower costs and better service. Cellular customers don't want to pay full fare for a telephone call in a home or office with a perfectly good Internet connection.
Out in the world, customers want their computers to attach automatically to the nearest cooperating Wi-fi and WiMAX networks, especially if they are already paying the operators of those networks for service.B In the wireless world, the interests of consumer and provider coincide because getting telephone calls off cellular towers saves expensive capacity.
A lot of companies are chasing those potential savings, but unless security is part of the package, convergence will never deliver its full potential. At the Communications Research Centre's sprawling, closely guarded facility in the west end of Ottawa, Joe Fournier and his colleagues serve some of the world's most demanding customers for secure wireless communications.
Among others, the list includes the Canadian Armed Forces and the Communications Security Establishment, the electronic spy agency. WISELAB, the Wireless Systems Engineering Laboratory, does real-world research to deliver specific solutions to private and public sector customers, but they also keep an eye on the current and future wireless environment.
Looking ahead, Fournier says nobody can know what the next 'killer app' will be but whatever it is, people will demand wireless. "One thing we can predict is that people want that application virtually all the time, once they get addicted to it," he said. "We see people for hours and hours and not just sitting at home, so we feel that there is a wireless convergence play."
Manufacturers want all the radio technologies, including all the different flavours of WiFi, WiMAX and cellular, to coexist on the same device and be seamless to the end user. "We really believe that this is coming, not just because it sounds cool from a technical perspective, but it is really the economics of it. All of these operators have to start figuring out how to raise their revenues and their margins and that is just the reality," he said.
Using the appropriate network to deliver service is good for everybody. "You get faster speed. They possibly can justify charging you even more because it is faster speed. In the process they are actually improving their performance profile from a network perspective."
Hopping between networks looks like the handoffs that pass telephone calls from one cellular tower to the next, "But there is a big difference and that is one of the challenges that we deal with. This still is all controlled by the same operator. Now you may end up with roaming between large operators."
No matter how that network-to-network transition takes places, there will be no security without some overall coordination. Wireless technology itself is no more or no less secure than any other, Fournier said. People just want to see the secure lock logo on their screens that signals a secure connection.
"We feel that little lock is the driver for what the architecture ends up looking like," he said. "The fact is, you have to have friendly communication amongst all of these fabrics in order to hand off the proper addressing scheme such that the little wireless lock can be transported over all these technologies without breaking."
In effect, moving a secure transaction across networks is like transferring a shipment of gold from a moving armoured car to a speeding train: everything has to happen just right. As Fournier said, the server at a bank really doesn't care where a transaction is coming from, but it will probably lock down if it detects any kind of disruption.
"It has to be seamless from that perspective and it has to be seamless at your handheld device," Fournier said.
With just seven people, Fournier concedes that WISELAB is not about to shape the wireless world to its own vision.
"We're just trying to plant the seeds of ideas that will actually enable us down the road to have the type of mobility and transportability of seamless applications over multiple wireless fabrics."
On the other hand, the Communications Research Centre has influenced government policy for decades, so WISELAB's vision could be more fact than futurism.
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