All-wireless office launches for 6,000 users at Japanese company

Computerworld - The completely wireless office has remained the Holy Grail of wireless aficionados for  years, but when will it truly happen? When will all the workers in a company be able to cut the wires and operate with voice, data and video running over Wi-Fi to the cellular network, or an assortment of other networks?

Well, it just so happens that attaining the wireless office is more than a parlor game for theoreticians and, in fact, is beginning to take shape.

The largest announced wireless office deployment so far is at Osaka Gas Co. in Japan, according to Ken Dulaney, a Gartner Inc. analyst who studies such technologies.

About 6,000 dual-mode (Wi-Fi and cellular) phones were deployed from May 2005 to March 2006 at Osaka Gas’ offices throughout Japan for the company's 6,000 full-time workers, said Koji Matsumoto, manager for the networking technology team, in an e-mail interview conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.

Even so, the deployment is not without compromises with the wired world, he said. Osaka still has an additional 6,000 wired phones, including 4,000 that are IP-based and used for 3,000 temporary workers who don’t need the wireless mobility. Another 2,000 wired analog phones are being kept for emergencies such as loss of power in an earthquake, Matsumoto said.

He said that the total investment in the project was about $10 million, an amount that will be returned in two years because annual costs have dropped by $5 million as a result of reduced costs for maintenance, operations and telephone charges.

The system is built to rely on a maximum of 10 simultaneous calls to each Wi-Fi access point, meaning that the 11th call gets a busy signal, Matsumoto said. Meru Networks in Sunnyvale, Calif., provides a call admission control server used to coordinate peak levels of traffic, and Osaka officials can also add more access points for areas of heavy demand, Matsumoto said. "We have not experienced any fatal troubles so far," he said last week.

To reduce cellular network charges, Osaka has relied on a least cost routing (LCR) function built into its Session Initiation Protocol servers, Matsumoto added. With the LCR technology, a cellular phone number is converted to an extension number for use within a wireless LAN area. Also, a cell phone can be considered a fixed-line phone for calling to a cell phone outside its extension area, to further lower costs. Annual costs at Osaka have been reduced by about 30%, according to Kamal Anand, vice president of product management at Meru.

The greatest technology obstacle in setting up the system was providing efficient WLAN configurations in nearly 50 offices throughout Japan, Matsumoto said. "The transparency and reflectiveness of radio vary from building to building, from floor to floor or from room to room," he said. "There is no general way of designing and configuring wireless LANs."