VeriSign to Trial Dual-Use Networks at 3 Schools
VeriSign will run network trials for voice-data Wi-Fi at 3 major universities, the company announced Tues. VeriSign said the networks will be “aimed at integrating on-campus Wi-Fi with any wide-area wireless carrier network” to enable seamless roaming between voice and data networks. Though the service can connect any device with an IP connection to a wireless carrier, VeriSign said it expects the service, dubbed Wireless IP Connect Service, to be used mostly for linking mobile and Wi-Fi networks.
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Larger state schools make an excellent testing ground because students are always there, said Tom Kershaw, VeriSign vp-Next Generation Networks. He estimated that 30% of mobile use takes place in homes and offices, whereas virtually all use by college students and faculty is indoors. The readily available 802.11 signals in buildings around campus create a fertile testing ground, he said. When students “go home for the weekend,” Kershaw said, the dual-use handsets provided in the trial switch off Wi-Fi and go back to cellular.
The biggest challenge is getting users on dual mode phones, most of which cost about $600, Kershaw said. “We laugh at the other costs,” he said. As a result, the pilot programs at the U. of Mich., Tex. A&M and Northwestern U. don’t involve many students yet. He estimated the total number as “in the hundreds.” The scaling doesn’t matter, said Andy Palms, IT dir. at the U. of Mich., because of the way the data network is configured. “If we can make the hand-off” from the school’s Wi-Fi network to VeriSign’s massive SS7 network at all, he said, the number of users on the network won’t have an adverse effect on coverage. Palms and fellow U. of Mich. engineer Pradit Patel, who oversees the VeriSign project there, agreed with Kershaw that handset cost imposes the greatest limitation now.
“The primary market is going to be for other carriers,” Kershaw said of the service. Major carriers would adopt the service and offer it in turn to large universities and businesses, he said. Admitting “there’s a lot of work to be done on the handset side,” he said it’s very promising to be so far advanced so early in the technology life cycle. Palms and Patel said the initial testing in Mich. has gone very smoothly and that widespread dual-mode adoption could be a legitimate possibility in the long term. “I wouldn’t say this is immediately imminent,” Palms said, “but I firmly believe that people will be walking around with these devices.” Patel said that as long as networks can secure number portability, giving each user “a single identity,” Wi- Fi/VoIP networks are the wave of the future in large institutional environments. Ian Martinez