EyeForWireless: WiFi Alliance Technical Leader Speaks

Next up on the conference agenda was a speech from Sarosh Vesuna, Sr. Director of Strategic Alliances at Symbol systems, and Chair of the Technical Committee for the WiFi Alliance. Sarosh delivered an interesting speech, largely because of his WiFi insider honesty on where WiFi has problems. He used this as a platform to discuss some of the areas in which the WiFi Alliance is now focusing in order to improve the user experience. A focus for the alliance is to improve the interoperability and customer experience of WiFi kit. Sarosh asks, "How are regular customers supposed to cope when certified gear is not interoperable out of the box because one has WEP on, and the other doesn't, or one uses Hex keys while the other uses ASCII." He's right, these are real problems that we cannot expect mass consumers to solve without a lot of very costly calls to customer support. The industry Alliance should drive towards standard configurations for easier "out of the box" interop. Sarosh also repeated some things we have mentioned here before on Techdirt, specifically that telcos were leery of WiFi because they are used to providing five nines of reliability on dialtone, and are cautious about offering a service in a less reliable manner. Yet, how can they offer the carrier-grade Hotspots in a reasonable economic model? The costs of carrier-grade Hotspots preclude free WiFi, yet Sarosh agrees with Techdirt's Mike that WiFi prices need to approach 0 to get mass adoption.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: wifi, wi-fi


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Sarosh Vesuna, 22 Apr 2004 @ 5:47pm

    EyeForWireless: WiFi Alliance Technical Leader Spe

    Thank you for your accurate reporting of the issues I discussed in my speech at Eye for Wireless. Sarosh Vesuna

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.