The Washington Post published some especially clueless remarks on WiFi and Iraq recently:
Will Wi-Fi — wireless networking technology — be the answer to reconstructing Iraq’s devastated telecommunications infrastructure?
“By using Wi-Fi,” USA Today reported this week, “parts of Iraq could skip the build-out of traditional phone and cable networks altogether. The situation is similar to how cell phone technology enabled huge swaths of the Third World to avoid regular land-line phone systems. Wi-Fi equipment makers such as Cisco Systems, Proxim and Nomadix are talking to government agencies and non-profits about possibilities for Wi-Fi in Iraq.”
Nobody likes WiFi more than I do (I invented the largest part of the MAC protocol that WiFi uses), but I have to say that this article is nonsense. In the first place, Iraq’s telecom infrastructure isn’t “devastated”; the coalition went out of its way not to damage infrastructure, and even if it had destroyed some telecom switching centers, the bulk of the cable plant is obviously still intact. So the question is whether any reasonable person would substitute WiFi along with something like voice over IP as an alternative to a telecom network with shiny new switching centers. Gee, what a comparison: with wired telecom, you get as many interference-free channels as you have pairs of wires, or millions. With WiFi, you get three. With telecom, your conversation is digitized nearby, and all parts of it arrive at the other end within microseconds, intact and in the right order, while with VoIP and WiFi, some of it gets there, some of it doesn’t, some gets there pretty quick, some not so quick, and some in the wrong order and it’s all dependant on what your neighbor or the other guy’s neighbor or some other neighbor is doing. With telecom, you can connect to the system with a $10 analog phone, and with WiFi you need a computer, a WiFi NIC, a whole boatload of software and a headset, and your battery better be charged.
There’s a lot of nice things you can do with WiFi, but replacing the phone network isn’t one of them.