Will WiFi Hotspots beat 3G?

[Martin I Pettinger]

Hi

In the UK the first 3G mobile phones are about to be launched but meanwhile telecom companies have plans to roll out wireless hotspots.

Now if you are in a large town or a city what is the attraction of a 3G phone when you could use a PPC with a WiFi connection.

Two 3G issues for me are cost - I can see 3G being very expensive and small screens on mobile phones.

Also (bit of a ramble this late post) but how are security concerns being addressed with WiFi?

My company is holding off on WiFi enabled note-books due to worry of hackers - question is are PPC's more secure?

Martin

[Jack]

Martin,

The main benefit of 3G over Wi-Fi will be availability of signal over a much larger area IMO. £G is positioned as a wide area mobile service whereas Wi-Fi is local. If there's good distribution of Wi-Fi in a specific area (local shopping area) then that would be preferrable to 3G if that all you need. What we really need is transparent roaming between 3G and Wi-Fi, well you never know!

There's a lot of progress with security issues in Wi-Fi. You will start seeing devices certified as WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) shortly which is a pre-standard version of the new Wi-Fi security standard (IEEE 802.11i). IMO you can secure Wi-Fi now via the use of VPN (IPsec) sioftware however there's very little you can do to protect against denial of service attacks.

PPCs have all the same issues as note-books froma Wi-Fi security perspective.

Cheers

Jack