I was disappointed when the phone failed to detect my 5GHz Wi-Fi network. This is like the iPhone, but the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Nexus support 5 Ghz, and I had assumed parity for the Razr.

Oddly, bearing in mind its dual core processor, the Droid Razr sometimes seems sluggish compared to the iPhone 4. But the Android user interface is polished and usable, and it has a significant user interface feature that the iPhone sorely lacks: a universal ‘back’ button. The ‘back’ button, like the ‘undo’ feature in productivity apps, fits with the way people work and learn: try something, and if that doesn’t work, try something else.

The Razr camera is currently unusable for me. The first photo I took had a 4 second shutter lag. On investigation, I found that if you hold the phone still, pointed at a static scene, it takes a couple of seconds to auto-focus. If you wait patiently for this to happen, watching the screen and waiting for the focus to sharpen, then press the shutter button, there is almost no shutter lag. But if you try to ‘point and shoot’ the shutter lag can be agonizingly long – certainly long enough for a kid to dodge out of the frame. This may be fixable in software, and if so, I hope Motorola gets the fix out fast.

While playing with the phone, I found it got warm. Not uncomfortably hot, but warm enough to worry about the battery draining too fast. Investigating this, I found a wonderful power analysis display, showing which parts of the phone are consuming the most power. The display, not surprisingly, was consuming the most – 35%. But the second most, 24%, was being used by ‘Android OS’ and ‘Android System.’ As the battery expired, the phone kindly suggested that it could automatically shut things off for me when the power got low, like social network updates and GPS. It told me that this could double my battery life. Even so, battery life does not seem to be a strength of the Droid Razr. Over a few days, I observed that even when the phone was completely unused, the battery got down to 20% in 14 hours, and the vast majority of the power was spent on ‘Android OS.’

So nice as the Droid Razr is, on balance I still prefer the iPhone.

P.S. I had a nightmare activation experience – I bought the phone at Best Buy and supposedly due to a failure to communicate between the servers at Best Buy and Verizon, the phone didn’t activate on the Verizon network. After 8 hours of non-activation including an hour on the phone with Verizon customer support (30 minutes of which was the two of us waiting for Best Buy to answer their phone), I went to a local Verizon store which speedily activated the phone with a new SIM.

Deciding on the contract, I was re-stunned to rediscover that Verizon charges $20 per month for SMS. I gave this a miss since I can just use Google Voice, which costs $480 less over the life of the contract.

The Atheros chip is called the AR6004. According to Rethink Wireless,

The AR6004 can use both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz bands and is capable of real world speeds as high as 170Mbps. Yet the firm claims its chip consumes only 15% more power than the current AR6003, which delivers only 85Mbps. It will be available in sample quantities by the end of this quarter and in commercial quantities in the first quarter of next year.

The AR6004 appears to be designed for robust performance. It incorporates all the optional features of 802.11n intended to improve rate at range. Atheros brands this suite of features “Signal Sustain Technology.” The AR6004 is also designed to reduce the total solution footprint, by including on-chip power amplifiers and low-noise amplifiers. Historically on-chip CMOS power amplifiers have performed worse than external PAs using GaAs, but Atheros claims to have overcome this deficiency, prosaically branding its solution “Efficient Power Amplifier.”

The 88W8797 from Marvell uses external PAs and LNAs, but saves space a different way, by integrating Bluetooth and FM onto the chip. The data sheet on this chip doesn’t mention as many of the 802.11n robustness features as the Atheros one does, so it is unclear whether the chip supports LDPC, for example.

Both chips claim a maximum 300 Mbps data rate. Atheros translates this to an effective throughput of 170 Mbps.

Of course, these chips will be useful in devices other than handsets. They are perfect for tablets, where there is plenty of room for two antennas at the right separation.

Mobility is taking the enterprise space by storm – everyone is toting a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or one of each. It’s all about what device happens to be tIn today’s distributed workforce environment, it’s essential to be able to communicate to employees and customers across the globe both efficiently and effectively. Prior to today, doing so was far more easily said than done because, not only was the technology not in place, but video wasn’t accepted as a form of business communication. Now that video has burst onto the scene by way of Apple’s Facetime, Skype and Gmail video chat, consumers are far more likely to pick video over voice – both in their home and at their workplaces. But, though demand has never been higher, enterprise networks still experience a slow-down when employees attempt to access video streams from the public Internet because the implementation of IP video is not provisioned properly. This session will provide an overview of the main deployment considerations so that IP video can be successfully deployed inside or outside the corporate firewall, without impacting the performance of the network, as well as how networks need to adapt to accommodate widespread desktop video deployments. It will also expose the latest in video compression technology in order to elucidate the relationship between video quality, bandwidth, and storage. With the technology in place, an enterprise can efficiently leverage video communication to lower costs and increase collaboration.

The panelists are:

• Mike Benson, Regional Vice President, VBrick Systems
• Anatoli Levine, Sr. Director, Product Management, RADVISION Inc.
• Matt Collier, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, LifeSize

VBrick claims to be the leader in video streaming for enterprises. Radvision and LifeSize (a subsidiary of Logitech) are oriented towards video conferencing rather than streaming. It will be interesting to get their respective takes on bandwidth constraints on the WLAN and the access link, and what other impairments are important.

Mobility is taking the enterprise space by storm – everyone is toting a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or one of each. It’s all about what device happens to be the most convenient at the time and the theory behind unified communications – anytime, anywhere, any device. The adoption of mobile devices in the home and their relevance in the business space has helped drive a new standard for enterprise networking, which is rapidly becoming a wireless opportunity, offering not only the convenience and flexibility of in-building mobility, but WiFi networks are much easier and cost effective to deploy than Ethernet. Furthermore, the latest wireless standards largely eliminate the traditional performance gap between wired and wireless and, when properly deployed, WiFi networks are at least as secure as wired. This session will discuss the latest trends in enterprise wireless, the secrets to successful deployments, as well as how to make to most of your existing infrastructure while moving forward with your WiFi installation.

The panelists are:

• Shawn Tsetsilas, Director, WLAN, Cellular Specialties, Inc.
• Perry Correll, Principal Technologists, Xirrus Inc.
• Adam Conway, Vice President of Product Management, Aerohive

Cellular Specialties in this context is a system integrator, and one of their partners is Aerohive. Aerohive’s special claim to fame is that they eliminate the WLAN controller, so each access point controls itself in cooperation with its neighbors. The only remaining centralized function is the management. Aerohive claims that this architecture gives them superior scalability, and a lower system cost (since you only pay for the access points, not the controllers).

Xirrus’s product is unusual in a different way, packing a dozen access points into a single sectorized box, to massively increase the bandwidth available in the coverage areas.

So is it true that Wi-Fi has evolved to the point that you no longer need wired ethernet?

Voice over WLAN has been deployed in enterprise applications for years, but has yet to reach mainstream adoption (beyond vertical markets). With technologies like mobile UC, 802.11n, fixed-mobile convergence and VoIP for smartphones raising awareness/demand, there are a number of vendors poised to address market needs by introducing new and innovative devices. This session will look at what industries have already adopted VoWLAN and why – and what benefits they have achieved, as well as the technology trends that make VoWLAN possible.

The panelists are:

• Russell Knister, Sr. Director, Business Development & Product Marketing, Motorola Solutions
• Ben Guderian, VP Applications and Ecosystem, Polycom
• Carlos Torales, Cisco Systems, Inc.

All three of these companies have a venerable history in enterprise Wi-Fi phones; the two original pioneers of enterprise Voice over Wireless LAN were Symbol and Spectralink, which Motorola and Polycom acquired respectively in 2006 and 2007. Cisco announced a Wi-Fi handset (the 7920) to complement their Cisco CallManager in 2003. But the category has obstinately remained a niche for almost a decade.

It has been clear from the outset that cell phones would get Wi-Fi, and it would be redundant to have dedicated Wi-Fi phones. And of course, now that has come to pass. The advent of the iPhone with Wi-Fi in 2007 subdued the objections of the wireless carriers to Wi-Fi and knocked the phone OEMs off the fence. By 2010 you couldn’t really call a phone without Wi-Fi a smartphone, and feature phones aren’t far behind.

So this session will be very interesting, answering questions about why enterprise voice over Wi-Fi has been so confined, and why that will no longer be the case.

The type of technology that Atheros announced at the beginning of 2009 was put on a standards track at the end of 2009; the “Wi-Fi Direct” standard was launched in October 2010. So far about 25 products have been certified. Two phones have already been announced with Wi-Fi Direct built-in: the Samsung Galaxy S and the LG Optimus Black.

Everybody has a cell phone, so if a cell phone can act as a MiFi, why do you need a MiFi? It’s another by-product of the dysfunctional billing model of the mobile network operators. If they simply bit the bullet and charged à la carte by the gigabyte, they would be happy to encourage you to use as many devices as possible through your phone.

WiFi Direct may force a change in the way that network operators bill. It is such a compelling benefit to consumers, and so trivial to implement for the phone makers, that the mobile network operators may not be able to hold it back.

So if this capability proliferates into all cell phones, we will be able to use Wi-Fi-only tablets and laptops wherever we are. This seems to be bad news for Novatel’s MiFi and for cellular modems in laptops. Which leads to another twist: Qualcomm’s Gobi is by far the leading cellular modem for laptops, and Qualcomm just announced that it is acquiring Atheros.

• The first generation was the autonomous access point.
• The second generation was the wireless switch, or controller-based WLAN architecture.
• The third generation is a controller-less architecture.

The move from the first generation to the second was driven by enterprise networking needs. Enterprises need greater control and manageability than smaller deployments. First generation autonomous access points didn’t have the processing power to handle the demands of greater network control, so a separate category of device was a natural solution: in the second generation architecture, “thin” access points did all the real-time work, and delegated the less time-sensitive processing to powerful central controllers.

Now the technology transition to 802.11n enables higher capacity wireless networks with better coverage. This allows enterprises to expand the role of wireless in their networks, from convenience to an alternative access layer. This in turn further increases the capacity, performance and reliability demands on the WLAN.

Aerohive believes this generational change in technology and market requires a corresponding generational change in system architecture. A fundamental technology driver for 802.11n, the ever-increasing processing bang-for-the-buck yielded by Moore’s law, also yields sufficient low-cost processing power to move the control functions from central controllers back to the access points. Aerohive aspires to lead the enterprise Wi-Fi market into this new architecture generation.

Superficially, getting rid of the controller looks like a return to the first generation architecture. But an architecture with all the benefits of a controller-based WLAN, only without a controller, requires a sophisticated suite of protocols by which the smart access points can coordinate with each other. Aerohive claims to have developed such a protocol suite.

The original controller-based architectures used the controller for all network traffic: the management plane, the control plane and the data plane. The bulk of network traffic is on the data plane, so bottlenecks there do more damage than on the other planes. So modern controller-based architectures have “hybrid” access points that handle the data plane, leaving only the control and management planes to the controller device (Aerohive’s architect, Devin Akin, says:, “distributed data forwarding at Layer-2 isn’t news, as every other vendor can do this.”) Aerohive’s third generation architecture takes it to the next step and distributes control plane handling as well, leaving only the management function centralized, and that’s just software on a generic server.

Aerohive contends that controller-based architectures are expensive, poorly scalable, unreliable, hard to deploy and not needed. A controller-based architecture is more expensive than a controller-less one, because controllers aren’t free (Aerohive charges the same for its APs as other vendors do for their thin ones: under $700 for a 2×2 MIMO dual-band 802.11n device). It is not scalable because the controller constitutes a bottleneck. It is not reliable because a controller is a single point of failure, and it is not needed because processing power is now so cheap that all the functions of the controller can be put into each AP, and given the right system design, the APs can coordinate with each other without the need for centralized control.

Distributing control in this way is considerably more difficult than distributing data forwarding. Control plane functions include all the security features of the WLAN, like authentication and admission, multiple VLANs and intrusion detection (WIPS). Greg Taylor, wireless LAN services practice lead for the Professional Services Organization of BT in North America says “The number one benefit [of a controller-based architecture] is security,” so a controller-less solution has to reassure customers that their vulnerability will not be increased. According to Dr. Amit Sinha, Chief Technology Officer at Motorola Enterprise Networking and Communications, other functions handled by controllers include “firewall, QoS, L2/L3 roaming, WIPS, AAA, site survivability, DHCP, dynamic RF management, firmware and configuration management, load balancing, statistics aggregation, etc.”

You can download a comprehensive white paper describing Aerohive’s architecture here.

Motorola recently validated Aerohive’s vision, announcing a similar architecture, described here.

Here’s another perspective on this topic.

Here is a chart of dual mode phones certified with the Wi-Fi Alliance from 2008 to June 30th 2010. We usually do this chart stacked, but side-by-side gives a clearer comparison between feature phones and smart phones. Note that up to the middle of 2009, smart phones outpaced feature phones, but then it switched. This is a natural progression of Wi-Fi into the mass market, but may also be exaggerated by a quirk of reporting: of HTC’s 17 certifications in the first half of 2010, it only categorized one as a smart phone.

The chart below shows the growth of 802.11n. It starts in January 2010 because only one 11n phone was certified in 2009, at the end of December. As you can see, the growth is strong. I anticipate that practically all new dual mode phone certifications will be for 802.11n by the end of 2010.

Below is the same chart sliced by manufacturer instead of by month. The iPhone is missing because it wasn’t certified until July, and the iPad is missing because it’s not a phone. With only one 802.11n phone, Nokia has become a technology laggard, at least in this respect. The RIM Pearl 8100/8105 certifications are the only ones with STBC, an important feature for phones because it improves rate at distance. All the major chips (except those from TI) support STBC, so the phone OEMs must be either leaving it disabled or just not bothering to certify for it.

The Wi-Fi certification process for Wi-Fi Direct is scheduled to be launched by the end of 2010, but there are already two pre-standard implementations of this concept, My Wi-Fi, an Intel product which ships in Centrino 2 systems, and Wireless Hosted Network which ships in all versions of Windows 7.

The Wi-Fi Direct driver makes a single Wi-Fi adapter on the PC look like two to the operating system: one ordinary one that associates with a regular Access Point, and a second acting as a “Virtual Access Point.” The virtual access point (Microsoft calls it a “SoftAP”) actually runs inside the Wi-Fi driver on the PC (labeled WPAN I/F in the Intel diagram below).

To the outside world the Wi-Fi adapter also looks like two devices, each with its own MAC address: one the PC just like without Wi-Fi Direct, and the other an access point. Devices that associate with that access point join the PC’s PAN (Personal Area Network).

This yields several benefits in various use cases.

I wrote a couple of years ago about how a company called Ozmo planned to use a Wi-Fi PAN to connect peripherals to PCs, replacing Bluetooth and proprietary wireless technologies. That plan has now come to fruition. Earlier this month Ozmo announced that it had received $10.8 million in additional funding, and this week it announced two major customers: Primax, a leading ODM of wireless mice, and NMB Technologies, a leading ODM of wireless keyboards.

Here’s a slide from one of their promotional presentations giving a comparison with Bluetooth and proprietary technologies:

The essence of Ozmo’s approach is low cost, multi-device, low bandwidth and low power consumption. Wi-Fi Direct has another use case that is high bandwidth, with no requirement for low power.

If you want to stream video from your PC to a monitor using traditional Wi-Fi (“infrastructure mode”) each packet goes from the PC to the access point, then from the access point to the TV, so it occupies the spectrum twice for each packet. Wi-Fi Direct effectively doubles the available throughput, since each packet flies through the ether only once, directly from the PC to the TV. But it actually does better than that. Supposing the PC and the TV are in the same room, but the access point is in a different room, the PC can transmit at much lower power. Another similar Wi-Fi Direct session can then happen in another room in the house. Without Wi-Fi direct the two sessions would have to share the access point, taking turns to use the spectrum. So we get increased aggregate throughput both from halving the number of packet transmissions, and from allowing simultaneous use of the spectrum by multiple sessions (if they are far enough apart).

A Wi-Fi buff would point out that you can already do all this with ad-hoc mode, but Wi-Fi Direct purports to be usable by mortals, and to work interoperably, neither of which could be said for ad-hoc mode until recently. In January Infinitec announced a new point-to-point video streaming product that claims to be easy to use and universally interoperable, that Engadget implies uses ad-hoc mode, though Google can’t find the words “ad hoc” on the Infinitec website.

Between the bandwidth extremes of mice and TVs, lie numerous other potential uses, like headsets (which Ozmo also supports); syncing phones, cameras and media players; and wireless printers.

The y axis isn’t labeled, but the divisions appear to be roughly 200 million units.

This year shows roughly equal shipments going to phones, mobile PCs, and everything else. There is no category of Access Points, so presumably less of those are sold than “pure VoWi-Fi handsets.” I find this surprising, since I expect the category of pure VoWi-Fi handsets to remain moribund. Gigaset, which makes an excellent cordless handset for VoIP, stopped using Wi-Fi and went over to DECT because of its superior characteristics for this application.

There is also no listing for tablet PCs, a category set to boom; they must be subsumed under MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).

The chart shows the portable music player category growing vigorously through 2015. iPod unit sales were down 8% year on year in 1Q10, and pretty much stagnant since 2007. ABI must be thinking that even with unit sales dropping, the attach rate of Wi-Fi will soar.

The category of “Computer Peripherals” will probably grow faster than ABI seems to anticipate. Wireless keyboards and mice use either Bluetooth or proprietary radios currently, but the new Wi-Fi alliance specification “Wi-Fi Direct” will change that. Ozmo is aiming to use Wi-Fi to improve battery life in mice and keyboards two to three-fold. Since all laptops, most all-in-one PCs and many regular desktops already have Wi-Fi built-in (that’s at least double the Bluetooth attach rate) this may be an attractive proposition for the makers (and purchasers) of wireless mice and keyboards. Booming sales of tablet PCs may further boost sales of wireless keyboards and mice.