Feature Story

September 8, 2006

Wireless connectivity seems to be expanding exponentially, enabling communications for new audiences, from cell phone game-players to emergency services providers. News@Cisco spoke with Alan S. Cohen, senior director of mobility solutions at Cisco, about the company's leading role in the delivery of products and services to the wireless market and about where this segment is headed.

Wireless is going mainstream and is impacting our lives in more ways. What is it about this particular time in the market that's making this adoption and productivity trend so explosive?

Alan Cohen: I think if you really look into the market, there are two particular drivers that are directing this move toward pervasive wireless. The first one is a kind of democratization of wireless technology - with the advent of the 802.11 technologies, which people commonly call Wi-Fi - that is moving into the marketplace.

We've seen a rapid growth where mobility-enabled devices as well as mobility-enabled networks came initially into the home and now are moving increasingly into the enterprise and the metro arena. But what we are really seeing is a very easy way to set up a wireless network to provide mobility. And both the mass markets as well as large commercial players have embraced that.

The second key driver has been, I would say, almost a gift from our colleagues up at Intel with the launch of the Centrino processor four years ago. Effectively what they have done is embed wireless into the client device such as the laptop or PDA. If you think about it, it's like giving away a cell phone. If you give people cell phones, they are bound to use them. If you put Wi-Fi clients into laptops, they are going to connect them to wireless networks.

Now that we have reached this level of adoption where people are familiar with Wi-Fi, and it has become part of the common lingo, what are some of the new cool things that people can do as a result of this "wireless everywhere?"

Alan Cohen: We are going through a generational change with pervasive wireless. Today, a lot of college students, even high school students and younger (in my case my middle school daughter), have cell phones and laptops. Those are the primary communications devices they carry.

In addition, many kids are being raised on games. So what you are starting to see is a generational shift by a large part of our work force to pervasive computing and playing and gaming in a wireless way.

Cisco is encouraging developers to take advantage of things like location, the ability to pinpoint where folks are in their use of any of these devices. Can you tell us a little bit more about what sort of applications and services are now going to be directing this?

Alan Cohen: Location was the first Mobility service to really take off in the Enterprise and we are seeing this across a series of industries as well as across a series of applications; for example, the ability to track assets from an IT point-of-view. We are working with a very large financial institution right now. They have wonderful applications written for servers, but if the server goes down they don't know where [the server] is. Also, people [in hospitals] are tracking infusion pumps, or doctors, or medical equipment. We neatly provide granular location tracking in our wireless systems.

And this includes radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices?

Alan Cohen: Absolutely, we call them active RFID tags. So it could be a dual-mode phone, it could be a Wi-Fi phone, it could be a laptop, and it could be a tablet PC. Or it can actually be an active tag which is effectively an RFID tag with a battery in it transceiving Wi-Fi.

As we've moved further and further into this, we realized that people want to write a family of applications around asset tracking. So, it might be an asset management, it might be an application focusing on work-force productivity on tracking where a series of devices are.

So we have created a series of APIs. We have about 14 partners who have gone through our program to basically write to our location tracking devices, to our location tracking software, and then create an application on top of that.

A good example of that actually, in a very public space, is work that we did with a partner named Appear Networks in Stockholm, Sweden, where they are actually tracking devices in the Stockholm subway. Based on where the location of that device is, they can then pull up the location and contact information. So, I am on (subway) track 45 in this part of Stockholm. The network knows where I am, for example, and they can then push information to my handheld device knowing where I am.

Another fascinating area for mobility is municipal mesh networking, where Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous. What is Cisco bringing to the table to encourage this municipal mesh benefit?

Alan Cohen: When we've talked about the democratization of these wireless technologies, bringing in municipal government isn't a bad example. In our architecture and in our unified wireless network we didn't just unify the wired and wireless network. We are starting to unify the indoor and the outdoor networks.

So the ability to stay connected to the network when you are outdoors also is a very, very powerful set of capabilities. What we found while working with about 40 municipalities -including our landmark win in Silicon Valley -- where we've deployed networks so far is there are a range of municipal applications - from video surveillance cameras, to information where people are actually working, and on to Wi-Fi parking meters. Think about that, you don't have to run around with a quarter any more.

So when we really look at the new municipal mesh network, it's not just the stand-alone wireless network that's popped up, it's really an extension of that unified wired and wireless network benefit both indoors and outdoors. So the ability to stay connected to the network when I leave the building is very, very important.

At some point, are we going to have an automated way of switching from network to network? Is that transition also going to maintain our security, provisioning, and identification benefits?

Alan Cohen: I think you will start to see that soon. Effectively today you have the ability to move between wired and wireless networks, in a fairly automated fashion, where you plug in or you don't plug in. And then our security software and our client software actually ask, "Okay, is there a wireless network? Do I have a profile? Should I get connected to it?" You actually have some of those seeds in place today.

Over the next two or three years, you may be in a rural area and there may not be a Wi-Fi network and there may not even be a cellular network, but there might be a WiMAX network. Increasingly you'll find that the device clients support that so Cisco's vision of mobility is not predicated exclusively on Wi-Fi. Obviously, that is the most available and pervasive alternative today. But as other network alternatives come to bear, our strategy will morph to take advantage of those connectivity options.

What about the possibility of being able to bridge work life and personal life across a number of devices. And when a user is connected to a certain network, the intelligence on that network will say, "These applications are available to you, we know who you are, and these are work-based applications."

Alan Cohen: Increasingly what we are finding is that you are working or you are playing - wherever you might be - and being able to connect to any network anywhere is ideal. Many of us have kids, and you've got to check on their homework or something, and you say, this is the time I've got to do it, and I do it. You know you might be at work, you might be at home, might be at airport, might be at a hotel, might be at a coffee shop. You know it might be some day while I am waiting to get my driver's license renewed at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

What about five or 10 years down the road? Will people even be thinking about networks at all, or will they be at the point where they expect broadband wireless connectivity all the time?

Alan Cohen: As I think about the kids that are going through school today, as they go through college and into the workforce, they are really the Wi-Fi generation. They'll have an expectation that Wi-Fi or other wireless networking alternatives will be pervasive.

So I don't think you'll worry whether your device is shipped securely and rapidly among those network alternatives. I think what will be the interesting part is what you will expect the network to actually understand. Will the network know that I am in a certain place and it can place some voice over IP call to me, or that I'm in a place that I can't receive a call, for example?

If you look at Cisco's Unified Communications offerings, they increasingly account for what we call "presence." For example, if I am in the conference room at work, I may not be able to accept a call - but I may be to accept a text message or maybe I'll accept an e-mail or voice mail or something like that.

So I think the expectation will not just be that there will be a network available to connect to, but the network will actually understand what mode I am in and how I should be communicating.

I think it's fair to say a few years down the road we will not be talking about access points, but about applications. The real reasons people use mobile networks is to get to information and applications. As the mobile generation develops a set of expectations of network connectivity - which is pervasive, both indoors and outdoors - the real issue will not be connectivity, but how well the network can support the personalization and presence-awareness of the application.