2.4 gig undercuts 5.8/5.9 gig

There are amazing advances in wireless communications in the unregulated 2.4GHz band that cast more doubt on the European, Japanese and ITS America/FHWA effort to develop special purpose DSRC transponders at 5.9GHz. A number of companies are now offering wireless transceivers that go under the generic term Wi-Fi that provide dramatic improvements in both range and data rates. Lucent spinoff Agere Systems now has for sale under the name ORiNOCO a family of systems that will handle 11Mbits/sec at ranges from a few meters up to 26km (16mi). That 11Mb/s is the equivalent of 22 times a common toll transponder in the 900MHz band, seven T1 links or 200 56k dialup modems operating in parallel. Agere is targeting the ‘last mile’ market hoping to displace quirky DSL, the obsolete ISDN, cable modems and the like for hooking small businesses and homeowners into the internet. Wi-Fi also has immediate applications for networking of computers (LANs) within buildings but also later for wide area networks (WANs).

Advances in antenna design seem to be the key to the 2.4GHz equipment. Also helping are the IEEE 802.11a/b standards adopted in 1999. Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint. No product is yet produced for mobile use, but engineers say it will not be difficult to adapt it for use within cars and between cars and roadside equipment. Already there is talk of using Wi-Fi for video-on-demand and other potential mobile (m-) commerce applications with cars at rest. If these are installed in cars anyway for internal networking and m-commerce, as seems quite likely in the next two or three years, it may be cheaper to adapt 2.4GHz for electronic tolling and other DSRC purposes than to develop a specialized ITS system at 5.9Ghz. (See orinocowireless.com, wirelessethernet.org, wi-fi.com)