Tuesday, April 2, 2002

'CyberShuttle' Offers Wireless Internet Access to UC-San Diego Commuters By FLORENCE OLSEN California researchers on Monday unveiled high-speed wireless Internet service on a bus that shuttles students between the University of California's San Diego campus and a nearby commuter train station. The bus, which university officials have dubbed the CyberShuttle, offers what researchers describe as a glimpse into the future of ubiquitous computing. Now students and university staff members who make the 30-minute round trip on the bus every day can use the time to check their e-mail, look up Web pages, or download files. "We say this bus travels up to 65 miles per hour on the San Diego freeways, but it travels up to 2 million bits per second on the information superhighway," says Elazar Harel, assistant vice chancellor for administrative computing and telecommunications on the San Diego campus. San Diego researchers worked with experimental equipment from Qualcomm Inc., a communications company, to marry two different wireless technologies on the CyberShuttle. One of the wireless technologies, known as 802.11b, is widely used on campuses for connecting laptops or pocket PC's to an institution's wired network. The other technology -- developed by Qualcomm and known as 3G broadband, for third-generation broadband -- uses a competing wireless standard. The two technologies are usually viewed as incompatible, says Ramesh Rao, the San Diego campus division director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. The CyberShuttle, he says, demonstrates that the competing technologies can be married to give students high-speed mobile Internet access, even when traveling in a bus at speeds up to 65 m.p.h. Unlike 802.11b wireless technology, the 3G technology is modeled on cellular-telephone service, which covers a broad area and can be set up to bill customers who use the service. "This is an integration that surely any researcher in the field has thought of," Mr. Rao says. "What's new here is the effort to put it out in the field and turn it into a real service." Qualcomm's mobile broadband coverage is limited at the moment to about 20 square miles around San Diego. But the company says its coverage will expand as it sells the 3G equipment to cellphone companies. Beginning in July, Verizon Wireless will offer trial coverage within a 100-square-mile area in the San Diego metropolitan area and similar coverage around Washington. The 3G equipment, which is designed to handle high-speed data transmission, is mounted on existing cellular towers. Roberto Padovani, chief technology officer for Qualcomm, says the new version of 3G technology used in the CyberShuttle's trial run "has very high speeds and gives the user the experience that he would have with a DSL connection or even a cable connection." University officials say they cannot put a price tag on the experiment because the Qualcomm equipment is not yet in production. The type of 802.11b wireless-access point used in the shuttle is relatively inexpensive -- between $100 and $1,000 -- and is equipment already widely used on the campus. Many laptop computers have 802.11b wireless-network cards, and the university's students are accustomed to using them. If the CyberShuttle experiment is popular with students, says Mr. Harel, the assistant vice chancellor, the university will extend the mobile wireless service to other buses and locations that lack wired-network connections. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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