Agreat deal of progress has been made in the development of safer, faster and more-effective means of communications since legendary Greek military courier Philippides allegedly ran 26 undulating miles to Athens in 490 BC to deliver the good news of the Persian army’s defeat on the plains of Marathon — and promptly died from exhaustion.

That the quest for better methods of communication would one day spur people to seek alternatives to telecommunications technologies that heavily depend on hundreds or thousands of kilometers of cables for functioning has always been just a matter of time.

According to data published on the kursy.rsuh.ru Web site, over 800 kilometers of cables were used in some of the IL-86 and -96 aircraft that carry President Vladimir Putin. Similarly, a U.S. White House official — trying to drive home the impregnable level of security in Air Force One, the aircraft that carries President George W. Bush — said that about 500 kilometers of cables were used in wiring the plane.

This type of generous use of cables might impress CEOs in Silicon Valley and other IT havens who have invested billions of dollars into promoting cable-dependent businesses, but definitely not wiring minimalists — who are pumping cash today into promoting wireless technologies.

To them, such cases only reflect technological backwardness in an era of increasingly wireless hi-tech applications.

The long-awaited wireless era

Developed in the 1980s and 1990s, the wireless-technology applications in use today gained global popularity only a few years ago. Specifically, a major role belonged to the 802.11 standard — a family of specifications developed and accepted for use in wireless local-areas network (LAN) technologies in 1997 by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Inc. (IEEE).

Simply put, this standard provides an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and a base station or between two wireless clients, making it possible to gain access to networks irrespective of location.

Previously employed mainly in pagers and certain global-system-for-mobile (GSM) standards, wireless technologies are fast becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, prompting mixed reactions from the IT community. To some, it is the dawn of the long-awaited era of minimum connectivity with all its added advantages, while others see it as posing a threat to their cable-dependent businesses.

"Future advancement in high technologies is directly linked with availability of wireless applications capable of providing high-speed access for data transmission," representatives of South Korea-based Samsung Electronics said during the opening of a high-tech gallery on Tverskaya Ul. in July.

Russia and the wireless world

Wireless data-transfer technologies still have highly limited applications in most of Russia. Moscow, however, is an exception in this as in most cases, as some of these technologies are already being heavily used in business, education, health, entertainment and other industries, industry insiders say.

Alexander Klokov, director for IT and telecommunications in the C.I.S. at the Moscow office of U.S.-based MicroMax Computer Intelligence Inc., told The Russia Journal that Russia is just beginning to deploy some of these technologies.

Currently, these services are available only for pay at the Marriott Grand hotel and at Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow.

Jere Calmes, a vice president of customer operations and product management at mobile-telecoms firm VimpelCom, which owns the Beeline brand, said that these technologies have great possibilities in Russia. "They will offer a huge opportunity not only to those on the local market, but also to foreigners visiting Moscow and other parts of the country," he said.

But today, the prospect of these technologies, with an approximate annual turnover of $12 million, doesn’t seem so bright to executives in many major Moscow-based IT and telecoms operators. David Lee, deputy general director of Comstar Telecommunications Co., said that his company is not planning to offer such services on a mass scale at the moment, but noted that it "would readily provide them on special requests to particular users, such as hotels or airports."

Lee offered two reasons for this decision. First, there is the issue of security, because it’s presently unclear how secure the networks will be, especially when users can connect to their corporate LANs to access e-mail and other features, he said. Second, "the number of devices and their users is very limited at present in Russia, where they are mainly business visitors," he said.

Klokov noted the low penetration rate of notebooks and other portable PCs — essential equipment for deploying wireless technologies — at only about 7 percent of desktop-PC users in the country. Also, the level of Internet illiteracy — at almost 63 percent of the Russian population, according to the All-Russian Center for Studying Public Opinion — makes the issue worse.

"This low number of potential clients would not make large-scale deployment of these technologies commercially profitable for service operators today," Klokov said.

Other negative issues include high costs of equipment, difficulties in securing official authorizations to use certain free frequencies in the 2 MHz range, imperfect legislation and a high volume of illegal connections.

These problems notwithstanding, Andrew Sviridenko — CEO of SeeStorm, a Moscow-based developer of interactive, vision- and speech-enabled communication software — said that wireless technologies currently represent one of the most rapidly developing business sectors in the Russian economy, something noticeable in the fast-paced progress made in the industry over the past few years.

"New frequency ranges have been introduced, new equipment has become available, and public-access points and wireless LANs are spreading more actively. The number of HotSpots functioning in Moscow and St. Petersburg is expected to hit 140 by end of 2003," he said.

Sviridenko’s optimism may not be baseless. His firm’s latest product — Mobile Avatar Mail, used in animating 3D talking characters on mobile-phone displays — received the Overall Best Exhibitor award at the July 16-18 Wireless Japan 2003 Exhibition. The firm came in first out of 170 IT and electronics giants, including such cross-border behemoths as Canon, Fuji, IBM, Infineon Technologies Japan, MobiMagic, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Qualcomm and Sanyo Electric Co.

Sviridenko was upbeat. "The 3D Talking Head is a killer application for mobile-phone communications," he said. "And, given the extensive ‘go mobile’ and media-communications tendencies, the appearance of the Avatar mobile-messaging product on the market is extremely timely."

The wireless world and its applications

Since their debut in the 1990s, different wireless applications have been devised to provide adequate solutions to new challenges.

One such group — and by far the most commonly used for deploying digital wireless communications — is the GSM family, which includes GSM, 3GSM, Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS).

"We have thousands of customers in Moscow using our GPRS-based services because of their high quality and high-speed of transmission, which could be up to 64 kilobytes per second," VimpelCom,s Calmes said.

The WiFi segment

According to sector operators, WiFi facilities were initially designed primarily for corporate clients to avoid drilling holes through office walls and furniture and reduce cable overloads in offices.

Technically, WiFi, short for Wireless Fidelity, refers exclusively to applications based on the IEEE 802.11b standard. Other related applications include the IEEE 802.11a standard, commonly known as WiFi5, and standards IEEE 802.11d, e, g and x — all differing in area of coverage, frequencies and degrees of compatibility with the 802.11b standard.

WiFi-enabled applications capable of generating speeds of up to 11 megabytes per second in the 2.4 GHz band are the most popular standard used in majority of HotSpot locations. These are public areas such as airports, hotels and cafes where people can get wireless access to the Internet via a WiFi Access Point at broadband high speeds. Some laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs) now come from the factory with preinstalled WiFi-enabled facilities. However, laptops or PDAs without WiFi-enabled gadgets can also be used to gain wireless access to networks by plugging in a special card, IT experts said. Most WiFi-services providers have joint-user roaming agreements that allow users to gain access to a much larger base of multiple WiFi HotSpots. WiFi Alliance, a 194 member international nonprofit association founded in 1999, currently ensures unified standards in the sector.

Wireless versus cabled technologies

A major advantage of wireless applications is their ability to maintain constant voice- and data-communications exchange while on the move, sector operators said.

WiFi facilities can also transmit audio, text messages and video at little or no extra cost to users, as compared to high charges on similar mobile-phone services. This makes them cheaper, while their mobility makes them indispensable at conferences and corporate meetings and during negotiations.

Corporate and individual users have attributed the popularity of WiFi applications to an optimal correlation between price, quality and convenience — which partly explains the fear among cable-dependent services providers that wireless facilities pose a threat to their businesses in the long term.

Meanwhile, Moscow-based IT-services providers have noted that the situation is a bit different in Russia than in the West. In Russia, the role of wireless technologies, the types of services and who to provide them to are not clear. In addition, opinions and views of the industry operators differ on whether these technologies constitute a challenge to cabled-dependent technologies or are complementary to them.

Calmes said that it is still an open question who would eventually be providing these new services in Russia and said that "the democratic nature of the market will enable any person to do the job."

He added, however, that "VimpelCom is very well-positioned to develop and provide these new services along with its traditional telecommunications services. We have a very sound backup system and other synergies to build and maintain the networks."

Calmes also said that wireless applications could be competitive or complementary to cabled technologies, depending on the circumstances.

"For instance, at the same cost, it would be better to install wireless-telecommunications applications in a new office that will offer employees mobility and access from anywhere instead of using traditional cabled applications," he said.

Stressing that wireless technologies are not competitors with mobile-phone technologies, he added that "they are complementary applications, which people require in different situations or different stages during the day in the course of business."

Klokov said that he agreed, stressing that WiFi technologies can only help access the Internet in public areas such as hotels and airports that are fitted with HotSpots, places where access to traditional-cabled services would be impossible.

"But mobile phones equipped with facilities offering 3G services can be used in much larger areas outside the city — for example, at dachas in Moscow Oblast," he added.

On the issue of revenues, Comstar’s Lee said that it is not quite clear how providers of these services will eventually get paid or whether users are even willing to cough up the money at all. "Hotels and airports seem to be the main areas where demand will be high," he said, "but there are still problems with roaming agreements."