Wireless Dawn

Conveyancing Month!

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The UK’s first monthly on-line journal dedicated to conveyancers!

Text Box: Ubiquitous connection to the Internet at broadband speeds from anywhere in the UK is nearly here, and for some of us, it has already arrived. In January of this year, The Cloud, the European leader in Zone wireless technology, announced a major initiative to deploy widespread wireless broadband networks in city centres throughout the UK. The plan to have 'clouds' of wireless broadband internet access over the UK's major centres of population, will begin with nine city centre areas. This is the first major initiative to bring coverage to multiple cities simultaneously since mobile phone networks were built in the early 90s and will allow more than 4m people to connect to the Internet without wires. The first phase was completed in March of this year. Hundreds of WiFi hotzones are being rolled out in the city centres of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool and the three London Boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, Camden and Islington. Following the original announcement, the City of London Corporation announced plans to install a dense and comprehensive WiFi internet network throughout London’s Square Mile, and It is expected that more cities will also be announced throughout 2006. Many readers will already be familiar with wireless “Hotspots”, generally found in cafes and hotels. For little or no cost, customers can connect their wireless enabled laptops to a wireless internet connection. Here, the range of the wireless connection is no more than 30 or 40 metres. A “Hotzone” on the other hand, provide coverage over entire cities, and ultimately, entire countries. Each WiFi hotzone turns broadband-speed internet into radio signals which can then be accessed by laptops, PDAs, handheld games consoles and WiFi-enabled mobile phones to allow quick and easy Internet access. This means in these city centres it will be possible to access the internet wherever you are by simply turning on your device and logging on. People will be able to send emails, surf the Internet, access work networks, play games online, make cheap phone calls over WiFi and more from wherever they are within the city centre. Unlike some countries, where city networks have been built by a single service provider, who then have a monopoly on the provision of WiFi, the Cloud's networks are open to any service provider who would like to provide advanced wireless services to their customers. One such company is Vonage, an Internet telecoms provider which, together with other companies like Skype, is transforming the way in which individuals and businesses communicate by voice. By utilising an Internet technology known as VoIP (or Voice over Internet Protocol) Vonage enables it’s customers to make and receive phone calls using their broadband Internet connection instead of standard phone line. Vonage digitally converts phone calls into data that pass through high-speed Internet connections just like email. It comes out the other end just like an ordinary phone call. The main benefit of these branded VoIP services to customers is cost, particularly when compared to the standard BT business tariff. Vonage, for instance, offers a small business package which costs £18.99 per month. This provides free calls to any landline in the UK, free calls to any other Vonage customer anywhere else in the world, and very cheap international call rates, especially to the US and Canada. Features such as voicemail, caller display and call diversion all come as standard. And for an extra £5.99 per month, you can down load their “Softphone”, and turn your PC or laptop into a fully functioning phone, with just about every feature your average technophile could possibly dream of. And of course, the WiFi revolution doesn’t stop there. Just about every peripheral - printers, scanners, copiers, keyboards and screens - can now be networked wirelessly, creating open and more flexible work spaces, which are not circumscribed by wires, and the proximity of the closest network point. .

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Wireless Dawn!