For all the success Phil Belanger has achieved through the wireless Internet market, he maintains a unique claim to fame.

‘I was able to train Bill Gates to say ‘Wi-Fi.”

Belanger, better known as ‘Mr. Wi-Fi,’ came to campus Wednesday for a Syracuse Technology Roundtable.

Put on by the Computer Applications and Software Engineering (CASE) Center of Syracuse University and the Syracuse Technology Garden, the discussion featured Belanger, founder and chief marketing officer for Novarum, a consulting firm focusing on wireless and broadband communication.

Dave Molta, assistant dean for technology and assistant professor in the School of Information Studies, hosted the event.

‘I met Phil over 10 years ago when I was evaluating technology for a magazine called Network Computing,’ Molta said. ‘I try to look for industry people that have interesting stories to tell. I like to bring in guests that are doing interesting things in the industry.’

Belanger is most famous for his role in creating and marketing the standard for wireless local area networks (LANs) – 802.11.

He also co-wrote the access protocol that acts as the foundation for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) 802.11 Immediate Access Protocol (MAC).

He is a founding member and former chairman of the Wi-Fi Alliance, a nonprofit international organization dedicated to ‘driving the adoption of a single worldwide-accepted standard for high-speed wireless local area networking,’ according to its Web site.

Wi-Fi, the technology that allows users to access the Internet without any cables, keeps users connected while surfing the Web or using a BlackBerry to check e-mail. Wi-Fi is even on the SU campus using AirOrangeX.

‘I think today we’ve gotten to the point where the typical college student uses Wi-Fi all the time,’ Belanger said. ‘It’s a wireless LAN sort of similar to Ethernet which is the big wired standard, but it’s done with radio.’

In his presentation, Belanger touched upon all the facets of Wi-Fi, from its conception through the production stages and its evolution up until today.

Belanger also spoke about the new industry standard for Wi-Fi, which will be the fastest wireless technology to date. He revealed names that were going to be used instead of Wi-Fi, such as ‘Dragonfly’ and ‘Transpeed,’ among others.

‘Thankfully, we chose the right name,’ he said during the presentation.

Wi-Fi is extending its services beyond the Internet, especially in consumer electronics, Belanger said. This includes a plan for an eventual wireless television set.

‘There’s another dimension to using Wi-Fi and that would be in consumer electronics products,’ he said. ‘So, this step forward in the standard has now enabled it to the point where you can have multiple high-definition streams squirting around your house because of those high data rates. And so we’re going to see it increasingly show up in consumer electronics gears.’

‘Basically, you know your house, everything’s going to have Wi-Fi and a hard-drive, so it’s like everything will be wireless,’ he said.

Belanger also addressed a primary concern for Wi-Fi users -Internet security.

‘Within Wi-Fi, there are security mechanisms,’ he said. ‘Five or six years ago they were broken, and so it kind of got a bad reputation.’

New security features are promising for Wi-Fi skeptics though, as Belanger described possible innovations to the service.

‘Now with the newer products, it’s very capable – the signal is encrypted, unless you have the same key, you’re not going to be able to decode it, and there are mechanisms for preventing intrusion from the outside,’ he said.

The future may bring Wi-Fi to entire communities, Belanger said. ‘The economics are already there; there’s zero cost to the client.’

Patrick Rummel, a first year graduate student in telecommunications and network management programming, attended the discussion.

‘It was pretty good,’ he said. ‘I caught some more of the history of it because I’ve taken some wireless courses so I know some of the technical aspects, but it was kind of interesting hearing how it developed and where it came from,’ he said.

wfmcmill@syr.edu

Published on February 20, 2008 at 12:00 pm