Lampposts talk the business

Low-cost high-speed wireless web access as pervasive as the mobile phone network could soon be a reality ... with the aid of talking lampposts.

That's the claim of a UK company called Last Mile Communications, which is being taken seriously enough for its patented technology to be included in two rival tenders for a government scheme to upgrade the data network that lines Britain's arterial roads.

This uses 63GHz radio links with frequencies an order of magnitude higher than Wi-Fi or cellphones and a correspondingly higher data rate: between 40Mbps and 400Mbps peaking around a thousand times faster than 3G phones.

More to the point, the system will have far more capacity than is needed for services envisaged by the Highways Agency, which plans to sell on the extra capacity.

The radio has a range of only around 250m so the system is built round a mesh of base stations that talk to each other as well as to passing traffic, conveying the messages until a landline is reached.

Last Mile's idea is to extend this network into cities, setting up low-range nodes in lampposts and other roadside items.

The nodes would support multiple communication technologies (even including infrared) so that at launch they would talk to passing Wi-Fi-equipped handhelds and notebooks and move on to faster links when available.

Whether the system would be able to cope with the formidable problems of routing and handovers as users meander among picocells remains to be seen, but Last Mile chief executive Anthony Abell is confident that it will. Trials begin in Exeter this year and there could be commercial deployments as soon as 2005.

Crucially, the company thinks it has figured out a way to make the scheme profitable, which partly explains why it has such an apparently inappropriate name.

'Last mile' usually refers to the connection between the local phone exchange and the user; the company has redefined it to mean the space between the edge of the fixed network and the untethered user.

Last Mile wants to make that edge as intelligent as possible so it can deliver access and services to mobile users. "The key is to make lampposts smarter," said Abell, and he is not joking.

He plans to install 150,000 lamppost modules, costing around £200 each, that will have a large cache of location-based information, such as weather and traffic news, council forms and announcements, events, hotels, garages and so on.

Abell reckons that advertising would cover the cost of each module within a few weeks. "It's an electronic equivalent of roadside hoardings, except that it's interactive. You can contact the advertisers," he said.

Users will get a software module called the Magicbook that will allow them to choose which information they want to receive. But not all users would be mobile. People living near the lampposts will be able to use them as internet 'on-ramps' that are independent of local cable or phoneline access.

Abell explained that he could deliver access for a third of the current cost of a 512Kbps broadband link, although cached public service information and advertising will be free.

Last Mile would not sell access directly. That would be done by operators that would buy rights to a particular area. The scheme could face competition from digital radio, which could deliver similar localised advertising on an existing infrastructure, using the cellular network as a back channel.

Last Mile cannot be faulted for lack of imagination, and a picocell architecture along these lines makes a lot of sense in cities.

It is similar to the idea of a 'whispering wireless' net: the low transmit power maximises user density, extends battery life on client devices, and goes some way to reassure people who fear health damage from radiation.

An alternative scenario would be for all home and office Wi-Fi nodes to have both a public and private face, subsidising personal use by providing passers-by with web access.

Ironically, Abell reckons that operators which buy into his system will include cellular companies which not so long ago forked out £25bn for the right to deploy 3G in Britain, and once hoped to recoup that investment partly from localised services very like those envisaged by Last Mile.

"That was the wrong technology, in the wrong place, at the wrong time," said Abell.

Travelling the new road network
Contracts for the National Roads Telecommunications Services Project are expected to be awarded this autumn.

The upgraded network will augment existing services such as breakdown assistance with emerging telematic applications, which exploit global positioning and wireless comms to provide services to vehicles and drivers.

On the plus side this will be able to warn drivers of traffic jams and accidents, even imposing instant speed limits to prevent a crash developing into multiple pile-ups.

On the minus side, at least from the point of view of fast drivers, it will be able to maintain a permanent check on vehicle speeds so that there will be no more racing between radar checks.

Nodes will be spaced further apart than the 250m range of the 63GHz telematic signal, and communicate with each other using a longer-range technology, possibly optical.

Data will delivered to vehicles in bursts: a car travelling at 70mph will have a 'window' of just under eight seconds on each node.

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