Asia Times: Southeast Asia


	May 24, 2002	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Wired Singapore going wireless
By Tony Sitathan

SINGAPORE - When the concept of going wireless was first mooted in Singapore back in late 1990s, in the country's IT 2000 blueprint, it was still considered a pipe dream. Now after more than a decade and struggling with the broadband launch of Singapore ONE, this wireless dream is slowly taking shape.

For a tiny island, only 44 kilometers from point to point and with a population of barely 3.8 million people, it is creating quite a stir in the world of multimedia, by transforming itself into a wireless data connected hub for Asia. Will its dreams come true?

According to Matthias Goertz, formerly with Booz, Allen and Hamilton, a management consulting company specializing in information technology (IT) implementation, this pipe dream is becoming that reality. "First, it was the successful implementation of the Singapore ONE dream. Now it's much more a reality, and implementing wireless communication ports will essentially make Singapore an ideal test bed for future companies to roll out their wireless applications and solutions," he said.

There are already trials conducted to test the feasibility of wireless data communications transferring broadband technology, not through cable or other means but by receiving and transmitting broadband signals.

That is called the next generation broadband dream, after Singapore ONE. Singapore ONE rolled out commercially in 1998 and so far has more than 900,000 subscribers. Its huge success was a vote of confidence for the National Computer Board which nurtured the broadband dream and led a consortium of companies and regulators and infrastructure players to execute the first successful en masse broadband implementation in Southeast Asia.

Wireless technology is considered the next frontier in creating the right framework to exchange data in an open and distributed environment. Although advances have been made in wireless technology, it is still in its infancy.

The Networking Services Group of Institute of Systems Science (ISS) and the Center of Wireless Communications and Ericsson Radio Systems AB, are making inroads in rolling out wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) solutions in Singapore. It is a S$5 million (US$2.8 billion) research project that has placed the importance of high-speed wireless data communications at the fore.

The center for wireless communications is working to produce commercially viable products, systems, services and applications with research in spread spectrum communications and integrated voice, data and cordless communications. By working on a wireless ATM project, it is extending services available on broadband ISDN (high-speed modems) to mobile users. A second joint project is tackling the issues related to introducing low-rate mobile multimedia communications over existing GSM networks.

According to Leong Kee Chun, an engineer for a local ATM company involved in the roll-out of this technology, the objective of WARP (Wildly Accelerated Relational Performance) is to explore key issues in wireless networking systems and in particular how they affect the broadband ATM technology. "As such, WARP is geared to meet three basic considerations. It involves the provision of a flexible multimedia programming platform [or middleware] for the creation, deployment and management of multimedia services," he said.

What does that mean? It's a system based on an open distributed computing model that acts as a control agent to access various networks, or an open standard interface that connects to the rest of the environment in the networking world. "As such, it leads to the exploration and development of algorithms to handle wireless networking issues like call controlling, data management that translates into handover and location management," he added.

This would translate into providing SMS (Systems Management Server)-related and WARP-related services into the Singapore ONE broadband framework. Hence, companies building wireless applications and solutions can find their solutions ported over to Singapore ONE in a matter of little time. "This makes it truly interactive and multidirectional," says Derek Fong, an IT consultant with Interpid Technology in the United States.

Singaporeans get to see more applications being developed like plug-ins for video conferencing and ATM technology for multimedia applications that require wideband wireless communications. It's an entire gamut of wireless applications that could be the first of its kind to be rolled out in Singapore.

"We have seen failures in interactive TVs in Orlando, Florida, and the experiment by AT &T Wireless in rolling out their wireless solutions in one of the local polytechnic here in Singapore. But now we are entering a new era for wireless data communications that makes surfing the net only a tip of the technological iceberg," he said.

Ericsson, by juxta positioning itself as a pioneer in wireless ATM standards, intends to tap the Singapore One platform and develop its core research and development (R&D) competencies in Asia as well. "It acts as a springboard for more realistic programs and similar projects being rolled out in the rest of Asia," says a development manager from the Ericsson Singapore team. It intends to study a new system by which vast amounts of data can be transmitted through a cellular network.

Currently, the GSM network can transmit data at 9.6kbps, enough to support normal facsimile machines. The research team will explore ways to raise the speed to 25 mbps or 2,600 times faster. According to an expert in the data communications field, in order to reach this transmission speed and use it effectively, it has to run on entirely new systems, new protocols, new radio equipment and even new modulation schemes.

For all intents and purposes, new applications are expected to emerge for Singapore ONE such as mobile tourist help desks and portable terminals in places such as hospitals to enable doctors to quickly access patient records as well as even doing routine hospital checks by nurses on their patients. Its a fully serviceable, modern-day business concept with practicality in mind instead of bleeding-edge technology that often railroads the innovator and the user.

Infocommunications is a fairly young but extremely dynamic industry. "Infocom" describes the convergence between telecoms, data communication and media industries. According to a research study, only 3 percent of the world's population has the necessary equipment for multimedia communications and only 10 percent have a telephone. Indeed, only 50 percent of the population has ever made a call. Hardly a scratch on the surface of the wireless dream of Singapore.

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