Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Boeing Plans In-Flight Wi-Fi Offering

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 13:30:24 -0400

802.11/WiFi
 Boeing Plans In-Flight Wi-Fi Offering

Airplane maker Boeing is adding high-speed Internet access to its
in-flight amenity mix. Boeing will lease Ku-band satellite transponder
capacity from Space Communications Corp. in Japan to provide the wide
area network for its high-speed in-flight Internet service over the Pacific.
Boeing's subsidiary Connexion will begin Wi-Fi service installation in
early 2004.

==========================================================

Boeing Increases WiFi Footprint

(02/09/2003, BWCS Staff) The push to provide WiFi services in
the air has received fresh impetus, as US airplane giant Boeing
signed an agreement with Space Communications Corporation in
Japan. The Seattle-based manufacturer has contracted to lease
transponder time from the Japanese satellite operator in a bid to
guarantee high-speed internet access for its planes over the
Pacific.

Boeing is keen to offer all passengers on its long-haul flights the
ability to send and receive e-mails as well as access
entertainment services whilst on-board. As Joe Shaheen, director
of Operational Services for Boeing’s Connexion subsidiary, put it
“The leasing of Ku-band transponder capacity and establishment
of the ground station provides a robust wide area network and
will help ensure passengers have reliable, high-speed access to
the data and entertainment services they want and need during
flights."

Boeing will rent capacity on SCC’s Superbird-C satellite located at
144 degrees east, which it says covers the main Europe to
Asia-Pacific airline routes. SCC will also set up a satellite ground
station at Ibaraki north of Tokyo. This will provide the link
between online passengers and the internet.

Connexion plans to begin installing WiFi services on commercial
Boeing airliners early next year. It also claims that flight crews
will benefit from access to real-time crew and aircraft data,
although most passengers may rather hope that this is something
they already have pretty well covered.

http://www.bwcs.com/marketing/index2.cfm?subcat=4&id=1&findid=2295#2295?subcat=4&id=1&findid=2295

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China Unicom Aims for 3G Head Start

(02/09/2003, BWCS Staff) In a briefing to strategic consultants last week, China Unicom disclosed its ambition to be the first operator in China to launch 3G services. The company’s strategic plan called for Unicom to be ahead of its rivals China Mobile, China Telecom and China Netcom, its chief engineer Zhang Fan said, adding: “In promoting 3G technologies, we should lead the other operators in time, technology, quality of network, business and cost.”

According to the Beijing Morning Post, this was the first time China Unicom had explained its 3G strategy to the public. The company is committed to the CDMA2000 standard, though said it might go for a more advanced version than CDMA2000 EV-DO if network build is put back to 2005. Unicom had originally hoped to roll out its 3G networks by the end of this year, but has been held back by the continued delay in the granting of licences, now not expected until the middle of 2004.

In April this year, China Unicom signed up Swedish vendor Ericsson for the supply of an integrated wireless data network based on CDMA2000 and wireless LAN technology, to be rolled out initially in Sichuan province. At the end of February, Unicom had almost 7.5 million CDMA subscribers, accounting for just under 12 percent of its total customer base.

Boeing Increases WiFi Footprint

(02/09/2003, BWCS Staff) The push to provide WiFi services in the air has received fresh impetus, as US airplane giant Boeing signed an agreement with Space Communications Corporation in Japan. The Seattle-based manufacturer has contracted to lease transponder time from the Japanese satellite operator in a bid to guarantee high-speed internet access for its planes over the Pacific.

Boeing is keen to offer all passengers on its long-haul flights the ability to send and receive e-mails as well as access entertainment services whilst on-board. As Joe Shaheen, director of Operational Services for Boeing’s Connexion subsidiary, put it “The leasing of Ku-band transponder capacity and establishment of the ground station provides a robust wide area network and will help ensure passengers have reliable, high-speed access to the data and entertainment services they want and need during flights."

Boeing will rent capacity on SCC’s Superbird-C satellite located at 144 degrees east, which it says covers the main Europe to Asia-Pacific airline routes. SCC will also set up a satellite ground station at Ibaraki north of Tokyo. This will provide the link between online passengers and the internet.

Connexion plans to begin installing WiFi services on commercial Boeing airliners early next year. It also claims that flight crews will benefit from access to real-time crew and aircraft data, although most passengers may rather hope that this is something they already have pretty well covered.

T-Mobile Abandons 3G Autumn Launch

(02/09/2003, BWCS Staff) Germany’s largest mobile operator, T-Mobile, has given up on plans to introduce UMTS services in the third quarter this year, blaming insufficient handset supplies and unresolved technical problems for the new delay. Speaking at IFA 2003 in Berlin, the company’s CEO Rene Obermann said he was unable to give a concrete launch date and that T-Mobile was under no pressure to be first to market.

Chances are this means Germans will have to wait until next year before they can get their hands on a UMTS ‘Handy’. Vodafone D2 remains noncommittal about its 3G launch plans for Germany, and the two smaller operators E-Plus and O2 have both put back the commercial launch of their 3G services until the second quarter 2004. Not that anyone has noticed much pent-up demand for the service among German consumers. Analysts believe there are plenty of new picture phones in the shops for the industry to cash in on the traditional Christmas boom.

T-Mobile is currently trialling UMTS services in a number of German cities though said it had no immediate plans for a similar trial in London, as had been reported in the press (see Mobile Data Daily 18/08/2003). Obermann emphasised his company did not want to repeat the mistakes made in the early days of mobile data services, which were rushed out before technical glitches had been ironed out. He said handset suppliers needed to be able to deliver at least five-figure quantities before a service launch would make sense. There were also some problems with the design and functionality of handsets which remained to be resolved, Obermann said.

T-Com Launches W-LAN Offensive

(29/08/2003, BWCS Staff) T-Com, Deutsche Telekom’s fixed network unit, has announced ambitious plans to turn W-LAN into a mass market commodity similar to DSL, which has become a standard feature in German households. Speaking at the IFA 2003 consumer electronics exhibition in Berlin, T-Com head Josef Brauner said that in the first half of this year the company had sold six times more W-LAN consumer equipment than in the whole of 2002. “We will make W-LAN a mass market and strengthen our leading position in Europe,” he said.

T-Com, which is keen to develop the wireless and broadband home market, already offers a range of wifi products for home use and is collaborating with Sony to drive wireless networking of consumer electronics, including digital cameras, television sets and DVD players.

In addition to targeting home users, T-Com also wants to extend its presence in the public W-LAN space. Together with its sister company T-Mobile, it is considering partnerships with petrol stations and similar public venue owners to set up hotspots offering wireless internet access to the combined fixed and wireless customer base of the two companies. T-Com currently has 40 million customers and T-Mobile is Germany’s largest wireless operator with 25 million subscribers.

T-Com’s W-LAN ambitions appear at odds with the lacklustre hotspot rollout of its wireless sister company to date. T-Mobile, which has set up over 2,500 hotspots in the US, has so far established only a handful of access points in Germany, including Munster/Osnabruck airport and some Ramada-Treff hotels. More wifi activity appears to be happening in another corner of Deutsche Telekom: the operator’s ISP arm T-Online signed up its first hotspot roaming partner, MainSurf, earlier this week (see Mobile Data Daily, 26/08/2003).

T-Online Adds Berlin to Hotspot List

(01/09/2003, BWCS Staff) Only days after announcing its first W-LAN roaming partner, T-Online has signed up a second hotspot operator, BerlinNet, to help it expand its wireless LAN coverage in key German cities and reach its target of 200 hotspots by the end of the year. The Berlin WISP adds 30 hotspots across the capital Berlin to the T-Online portfolio, including such popular locations as Unter den Linden/Friedrichstrasse, Kurfuerstendamm and Pariser Platz/Brandenburger Tor, as well as numerous hotels and cafés.

The new roaming agreement is the second concluded in just one week. The earlier deal, with MainSurf, will give T-Online subscribers access to 24 W-LAN hotspots in the city of Frankfurt/Main, Germany’s financial capital. The company’s virtual wifi rollout is primarily targeted at business customers, and its deal with BerlinNet was timed to coincide with the opening of the IFA 2003 consumer electronics exhibition on 29 August.

Access to the BerlinNet hotspots is provided via a central T-Systems W-LAN platform and is charged per minute directly to the user’s regular Deutsche Telekom bill. A comprehensive profile of the German wireless LAN landscape, including detailed hotspot forecasts, is included in the Wireless LAN Continuum subscription service from BWCS.

Taiwan Mobile Merger is Off

(01/09/2003, BWCS Staff) The proposed merger between Taiwan mobile operators FarEastone and KG Telecom has fallen through, leaving rivals Taiwan Cellular and Chunghwa Telecom comfortably in the lead. The two operators signed a letter of intent last month, but in a statement issued on Friday KGT called off the US$876 million merger, saying it did not believe FarEastone was willing to cooperate.

FarEastone had requested an extension of the LOI but, according to KGT, had failed to submit its proposal before Friday’s deadline. The merger would have given the two operators a roughly equal share of the Taiwanese mobile market as its two main competitors and would have put them in a stronger financial position to prepare for the rollout of their 3G networks.

While some newspapers in the region speculated that FarEastone had asked for more time in order to negotiate a more favourable price for KG Telecom, FarEastone said it had asked for an extension as key shareholders of both companies had changed their minds about what to do with their stakes.

NTT DoCoMo, which owns 21.4 percent of KG, was originally expected to take a 20 percent interest in the new entity, but got the jitters after announcing losses on other overseas investments last month. Meanwhile, AT&T Wireless, which was believed to have been interested in selling its 23 percent stake in FarEastone to DoCoMo, was no longer happy with the terms agreed back in June, the company said.

France Telecom Goes For The Whole Fruit

(01/09/2003, BWCS Staff) France Telecom, its appetite whetted by Orange’s growing profits, is to buy the remaining 13.7% stake in the mobile operator that it does not yet own. This morning’s announcement was coupled with a healthier than usual financial report from the French giant. The deal will value the stake at euros 7.1 billion.

As the 100% owner of the mobile company, France Telecom will gain access to 100% of the cash generated by Orange. Company chairman, Thierry Bretton, hopes to use the cash in his continued battle to reduce debt and transform the lumbering telco. The move was made possible in July when the French government, still a substantial shareholder in France Telecom with a 53% shareholding, voted to allow it to buy out minority shareholders in Orange and the Internet unit Wanadoo.

France Telecom will offer eleven of its own shares for every 25 Orange shares, which works out at a premium of 25% on the current Orange share-price. The mobile operator will remain a company within its own right.

The attraction for France Telecom was underlined by Orange’s first half performance. In the six months to the end of June 2003 it increased its operating profit by 68% to euros 2.09 billion. The overall figure for France Telecom was euros 4.65 billion up from euros 3.18 billion. At the end of June, France Telecom’s debt-mountain stood at euros 49.3 billion, a reduction of some euros 18.7 billion since the beginning of the year.

Analysts in France believe that the partially state-owned operator will not make a similar move for the shares in Wanadoo that it does not own.

Train Hotspots Worth US$420 million by 2008

(29/08/2003, BWCS staff) By 2008 train travellers will be spending US$420 million per year on in-transit wireless LAN hotspot services, according to the latest report from W-LAN experts BWCS. Figures from Railway Wireless LAN Services indicate that within five years 625 million people will be travelling on WiFi-enabled trains around the world every year.

According to BWCS, as more and more prime hotspot venues such as airports and large hotels are signed up, attention is turning to so-called ‘mobile hotspots’ where WiFi has until recently not been feasible. Among this group trains and planes have been quickly identified as offering the biggest revenue potential because of the volume and type of passenger they carry.

Rail industry figures put the volume of global rail travel at somewhere in the order of two trillion passenger kilometres in 2002. “That represents a lot of people spending a lot of time on trains without access to email or the internet,” said BWCS wireless analyst Peter Kingsland. “The beauty of a train or a plane as compared to a station or an airport is that you know exactly how long people will spend in them and that most or all of them will be seated.”

However, would-be service providers must look beyond the headline figures, warns Kingsland. He said: “Right now, your average crowded commuter train won’t offer a quick return on investment. This is because the primary hotspot device, a laptop, requires the traveller to be seated with sufficient time and privacy to use it. Solution and service providers need to choose their routes to ensure that they have the right passenger profile.”

BWCS’ research has found that today’s train hotspot solution providers have already marked out high speed and pendolino (tilting) train services as low hanging fruit and are racing to sign exclusive deals with these operators. For long-distance high speed train operators, onboard wireless internet connectivity enables them to offer a host of business and entertainment services to their passengers and compete more effectively with short-haul airline services. As well as email and internet/intranet access, services could include travel information and booking, location-based maps of the train’s journey, TV news and programme content, wireless gaming and videos-on-demand.

As well as the opportunities Railway Wireless LAN Services also highlights the considerable technical challenges that solution providers face in delivering wireless connectivity to trains moving at 300+ kmph. Kingsland said: “Maintaining reliable connectivity at these speeds and through tunnels is a huge task. So far only a couple of vendors have achieved this in a commercial setting, but others are involved in trials and we would expect the number of public announcements to ramp up considerably over the next 6-12 months.”

For more information about Railway Wireless LAN Services, or to order a copy please email [email-masked].

Nortel Backs TD-SCDMA

(28/08/2003, BWCS staff) Nortel Networks has put is weight behind the nascent 3G standard TD-SCDMA by entering a joint venture with Chinese vendor Datang Mobile Communications Equipment. The two companies have established a joint research facility in Beijing with the aim of commercialising TD-SCDMA. Over the coming months the 3G technology will be tested for performance, interoperability and functionality.

Nortel and Datang are aiming to complete their testing program by the end of the year with a view to launching the first commercial TD-SCDMA products in the first half of 2004. The two vendors will be aware that the Chinese government has indicated that 3G licences could be awarded in the People’s Republic as early as March next year.

Although the Chinese administration is thought to favour the home-grown standard no decisions have been made as to whether TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 or W-CDMA will be selected as the chosen 3G standard. Early field trials have indicated that TD-SCDMA performs well in China’s densely populated cities. However the standard, which was developed by Datang and Siemens, remains extremely immature compared to its rivals. However the lower cost of deploying TD-SCDMA means that it could play well in emerging 3G markets.

In a separate development Alcatel has announced that it will be investing an additional US$45 million in its Chinese operations this year. The capital injection will be used to fund the development of 3G technology and applications for the Chinese market and for export overseas.

Hanaro Forges GRIC Deal

(28/08/2003, BWCS Staff) The South Korean fixed line operator and ISP Hanaro Telecom has announced that it has signed an international wireless LAN roaming deal with the aggregator GRIC Communications. Hanaro, which is the country’s second largest ISP behind the dominant telco Korea Telecom, says the service will commence on 1 September and that roaming will be offered free of charge for the whole month.

In a statement, Hanaro said: “Subscribers will be able to use the wireless LAN roaming service in 12 countries, including the US, China and France.” The two-way deal, which is the first involving a Korean WISP, will also allow customers of other GRIC partners to use Hanaro’s domestic network of over 500 hotspots. California-based GRIC recently signed a similar deal with SingTel of Singapore. More information about Hanaro’s WiFi services can be found in BWCS’ new online information service Wireless LAN Continuum.

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