Recent reports in American media indicate that Iraq has been targeted as the Middle Eastern country, where Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity, also known as Wireless Networking) technologies could be introduced on a mass-application
basis, to give the country's Internet sector a jump start in mobile connectivity.
At the present moment, there are just 13 Wi-Fi hotspots in Saudi Arabia, 5 in the UAE and 4 in Kuwait.
Wi-Fi Hotspots are predominantly used by owners of Intel Centrino powered laptops, with limited exploitation of Wi-Fi's potential as high-speed connectivity provider to Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). However, the incorporation of Wi-Fi enabled chipsets into two recent mobile phone models, the Nokia 9500 Wi-Fi communicator and the Motorola MPX has opened the doors for a new exploitation of Wi-Fi connectivity.
Wi-Fi, a young technology backed by the likes of Intel and Microsoft, sends Web pages, emails and instant messages via radio waves. That avoids the expense of cables, which has partly held up the spread of broadband or high-speed Internet, services in the USA. At the same time, at 11 Megabits per second (Mbps), Wi-Fi is characterized by hitherto unheard of speeds in wireless connections. According to on-ground reports from countries that have extensively developed Wi-Fi networks, the cost of setting up a base station can be as low as US$ 150.
"The introduction of Intel Centrino Mobile technology, which incorporates Wi-Fi connectivity in its chip, was the first catalyst to the adoption of Wi-Fi technologies. As compared to the relatively lower speeds and higher adoption expenses of cable-fed broadband connectivity, Wi-Fi became the ideal choice for a larger number of network providers in Europe and the USA," said Bashar Dahabra, Founder and General Manager of Info2cell.com the Middle East's leading Mobile Service provider.
"By 2003, when the Wi-Fi technology first began to gain ground, it had two inherent limitations. First and foremost, it was a technology with application limited to laptops. There were no mobile phones in the market that could access the Internet through a Wi-Fi hotspot. Mobile phones and PDAs were already using 2.5G (GPRS) technologies, which enabled the user to download music and video clips, besides limited web browsing capabilities. Although relatively more expensive than a Wi-Fi network, 2.5G further gained ground with the introduction of GPRS EGDE technologies that considerably augmented the web access speed encouraging increased WAP as well as WEB
Pages browsing. Where the 2.5G technologies scored was in the range of the network, as compared to a bare maximum of 100 Feet range for a Wi-Fi network. However, with laptops and mobile phones using two distinctly different technologies, mobile communications remained split between incompatible devices," added Dahabra.
"The introduction of Wi-Fi connectivity in mobile phones has changed all that. The two inherent benefits that come to mind are on the one hand the convergence between the laptop, a handheld and a phone, and on the other hand the relatively cheaper to install, maintain and use Wi-Fi network," said Dahabra.
© 2004 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
