Introduction

This document provides additional material for the Australian Computer Society, Professional Development Board's Interactive Branch Forums on "Will The World Go Wireless". These are to be held around Australian in February 2001: 21st NSW, NT, Qld, Tas, Vic, WA; 27th SA; 28th Canberra. I will be presenting the Canberra forum and have prepared this material to supplement the standard presentation prepared by the ACS's Professional Development Board.

A short version of the presentation, which concentrates on GSM wireless, is available as an eight minute audio accompanied slide show in Real Slideshow Format and as a set of web pages. The original slides and notes are available in MS Power Point format with short and full versions. Event details are available in the document: "Will The World Go Wireless".

Discussion Topics:

• Wireless developments, predictions and applications
• Wireless challenges such as payment models, application design, marketing, integration, security, health and regulatory issues

The Official Pre-readings:

1. What is Wireless, TechTarget.com, Inc. http://whatis.techtarget.com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,213380,00.html

   The term wireless refers to telecommunication in which electromagnetic waves (rather than some form of wire) carry the signal over part or all of the communication path.   Some monitoring devices, such as intrusion alarms, employ acoustic waves at frequencies above the range of human hearing; these are also sometimes classified as wireless. ...

   Common examples of wireless equipment in use today include: Cellular phones and pagers... Global Positioning System (GPS) ... Cordless computer peripherals ... Cordless telephone sets ... Home-entertainment-system control boxes ... Remote garage-door openers ... Two-way radios ... Baby monitors ... Satellite television ... Wireless LANs or local area networks...

• What's So Wild About Wireless? by George Anders Fast Company issue 41, page 356: http://pf.fastcompany.com/online/41/untangle.html

  Mention the words "wireless Internet" to anyone developing a Web strategy, and it's as if you had shouted "free beer" at a fraternity party. There's an outright giddy enthusiasm about the business opportunities that will arise as millions of Americans use cell-phones or other wireless devices to go online anytime. Look at Asia and Scandinavia, where wireless Internet use is the highest, the argument goes. Then imagine what could happen if the usage patterns in those regions were grafted onto the huge U.S. economy.

• How Wireless Internet Works by Jeff Tyson, Howstuffworks.com, Inc: http://howstuffworks.com/wireless-internet.htm

  ...you have seen news or advertising about cell phones and PDAs that let you receive and send e-mail. It seems a logical next step, but there are some questions that occur to you right away when you think about going mobile with the Internet. Will you still be able to surf the Web? How fast will you be able to get the information you need? You might have heard of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and wonder how it works. In this edition of How Stuff Works, you will learn just what WAP is, why it is needed and what devices use it.

• Is Bluetooth worth the wait? From The Economist Technology Quarterly, Dec 7th 2000: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=442885

  Bluetooth, 3G and other wireless technologies of the information revolution are on their way. But it will take more than marketing hype to realise their full potential

• Payment Models for Wireless, Alexis Gutzman, internet.com Corp., November 02 1999: http://mcommercetimes.com/Marketing/43

  In order for wireless technology and m-commerce to catch on in the United States as they have in Europe, U.S. carriers are going to have to design offerings around the budgets of soccer moms, not just corporate executives.

• Getting a Grip on 3G, Ed Sutherland, , internet.com Corp., December 01 2000 http://mcommercetimes.com/Technology/49

3G protocols promise to make the wireless Web faster, always on, and be more like the desktop Internet than it is now. The 3G standards will be the backbone of the revolution, but how do they work?

• The Wireless FAQ, Thursday, January 11, 2001: internet.com Corp. http://www.allnetdevices.com/faq/

  Definitions of terms and advice on getting started. If you're new to wireless technology, you should start here. ... In short, what is WAP? ... what is WML? ... How long will WAP last? ... Why use WML when you can use HTML? ... What is a good service for the mobile internet? ...

Additional Material

• Networking at Gus' Cafe, 26 January 2001: http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/gus/

  ... the cafe has changed from using pencils and note paper for taking orders and now has wireless PDAs

• Filling the WAP Gap - Wireless Communication Project, 8 January 2000: http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/scsp.html

  ... The aim of these projects is to demonstrate standards and software to allow a multimedia document to be created once and then rendered in different formats. ... The aim would be to demonstrate streaming a multi-media presentation with audio and "talking head" video in real time to a hand held device over a medium speed wireless Internet connection, as well as to display the same content on a TV set-top box web browser and conventional desktop computer.

• Olympic Failure: A Case for Making the Web Accessible, Seminar 20 October 2000, Oxford University, UK: http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/bat.html

  Wireless handheld Internet devices are currently seen as the new hot area for development of computing. However, there are problems with current approaches. The telecommunications carriers who have invested billions of dollars in next generation high bandwidth licences have wasted their money, as have WAP handset makers. The spinoffs from accessibility research will allow for handheld devices smarter than WAP phones which can provide a good service using the existing mobile phone bandwidth.

• Canberra Wireless Network http://www.air.net.au/

  The Canberra Wireless network is an effort by a bunch of Linux enthusiasts to build a high-speed wireless network in some parts of Canberra. Initially we are looking at North Canberra but some people have expressed interest in other parts of Canberra. If you are interested then I suggest that you start by looking at the mailing list archives and join the mailing list. By reading through the archives you'll get an idea of what progress we've made. There are wireless networks being built in other regions of Australia: Adelaide, Perth, Nepean (Western Sydney) and Tasmania.

• MPEG-4 Development at the CSIRO / DCS Virtual Environments Laboratory

  MPEG-4 is an ISO and IEC standard for the communication of interactive multimedia scenes. The original goal of MPEG-4 was very low bit-rate coding of video, and has since been modified to generic coding of audio-visual objects for multimedia applications. The standard specifies coded representations for natural or synthetic, two or three dimensional, audio-visual objects, along with their spatio-temporal positioning and response to user interaction. See Julien Signes' article for futher information on MPEG-4 and its scene description language.

• Moxy adaptive WWW proxy server (modifies web content for mobile devices):

  "Moxy is an adaptive WWW proxy server that modifies the content of the Internet into a suitable format for mobile devices. Moxy is intented to be used with mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), hand-held computers, laptops, wearable computers etc. Other potential clients could be TV browsers. The web browser must support the HTTP protocol and the use of a proxy. The mobile web surfer notices that some pages look different when surfing the web with a mobile device. For example, the quality of the images might be reduced, the font is large enough to read on a small screen etc. The simplification of the pages increases the usability of the web pages on mobile devices.

• rproxy by Andrew Tridgell

  Caches are used to good effect on today's web to improve response times and reduce network usage. For any given resource, such as an HTML page or an image, the client remembers the last instance it retrieved, and it may use it to satisfy future requests. However, the current-system is all-or-nothing: the resource must either be exactly the same as the cached instance, or it is downloaded from scratch. The web is moving towards dynamic content: many pages are assembled from databases or are customized for each visitor. In the existing HTTP caching system, this means that many resources cannot be cached at all. ... The rproxy extensions to HTTP allow the server to generate a diff relative to the cached instance in a way that is completely general, and transparent to both the server and user agent.

• HTML 4.0 Guidelines for Mobile Access, W3C Note, 15 March 1999

  A new class of electronics devices with Internet access capability called "Information Appliances" was recently born. This Internet access capability is embedded in devices such as televisions, set top boxes, home game machines, telephone-based terminals, PDAs, car navigation systems and cellular phones. These Internet appliances will drive the merger of wireless and wired Internet world that will eventually create a much larger industry than today's predominantly wired Internet industry.

• XML and Mobile Computing Paper and Demonstration, by Ken Taylor, CSIRO Spatial Information Systems Group.

  Combining XML, ASP and database technology provides a powerful mechanism for the development of mobile applications. We describe the development of an application that provides name, rank and phone number information for an organization. The information is accessible from a web browser or a WAP browser on a mobile phone. It uses ASP scripting to query a database and build an XML document satisfying the search criteria. We’ll detect the browser type then apply an XSLT style sheet to format the information for display on the detected device. A generic windows scripting component (WSC) derived from that described by Mike D. Jones in a February 7 2000 Active Server Developers Journal article is used to query the database and return the result to an ASP script as an XML document. You can view a working copy of the application at http://mobile.act.cmis.csiro.au and download the files to implement the application

• French Mobile Phone Manufacturer SAGEM Expands the Pocket PC Horizon, Combining Wireless Voice and Data Capabilities In One Device, SAGEM, Nov. 9, 2000

  SAGEM WA3050, the industry's first dual-band GSM/GPRS phone-enabled Pocket PC. The SAGEM WA3050 enables customers to have live wireless access to information, including email, the Internet, time-sensitive corporate applications and high-end mobile phone capabilities.

Further Information

• Full slides and notes (Open Office format)
• Author's home page
• Eight minute audio accompanied slide show

This document is Version 2.0 – 21 October 2000: http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/wwgw.html

Comments and corrections to: webmaster@tomw.net.au

Copyright © Tom Worthington 2000.