Man on a wireless mission

Allan Brennan wants to put wireless access on the feature list of apartment complexes and housing estates across the country, writes Karlin Lillington

Expect to see "wireless broadband" listed among the features of every Dublin "des res", if a small Dublin company called Wireless Projects has its way.

Wireless Projects is pioneering a plan to bring high-speed wireless internet access to apartment complexes and housing estates across Dublin - and eventually across Ireland, hopes managing director Mr Allan Brennan.

At the moment, the company is offering managed, secure wireless access to all 333 apartments in the Custom House Harbour (CHH) development within the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), as well as to an apartment complex in Lucan.

Because the management board of the complex picks up part of the cost - about €100 per apartment - tenants can avail of subsidised wireless broadband for around €100-€150 a year, well under commercial cost.

In addition, the bandwidth delivered, at two megabits per second, is eight times the capacity of a typical ADSL home connection of 256 kilobits, enabling tenants to watch television or films over an internet connection.

In an era of fluctuating rents and tenants, the board sees the service as an enticement for tenants to move in and stay.

"Ideally, we want to do every complex in Dublin, then every complex in Ireland," Mr Brennan says. "There's no reason that internet access shouldn't be a community service available to every tenant across Ireland."

Mr Brennan's sense of a community aspect to broadband comes from his involvement with Dublin WAN (www.dublinwan. org), a group dedicated to bringing low-cost, high-bandwidth internet access to Dubliners through community networks. WAN stands for wide area network.

His interest in wireless is rooted in his background in the information technology industry, working with companies such as IBM, Esat, Securicor and as a consultant with SAP. When he was with SAP, the consultants would set up their own internal wireless communications local area network (LAN) when doing large projects within a client's building, he says. This gave him an insight into other LAN possibilities, he says.

When around the same time he stumbled across a magazine article on Dublin WAN, he became fascinated by the idea of expanding from LANs to WANs, which would enable community internet access.

Then, at the end of 2002, as an apartment owner in Custom House Harbour and a resident member of the management board, he suggested subsidised wireless might be a way of addressing falling rents and attracting good, long-term tenants.

While the reception was generally open-minded, at least one board member was sceptical, Mr Brennan recalls. "He said to me, 'But that internet thing is never going to take off"," he says with a laugh. He made a presentation to the board, and more than 80 per cent voted to install wireless.

Now heading up his own company, Wireless Projects, Mr Brennan spent the next six months installing and testing the CHH network, and letting some very tech-savvy beta-users try it out.

Now about 20 per cent of tenants are availing of the service, which requires no modems or hardwire of any kind - simply a wireless-enabled computer.

Users sign up with Wireless Projects, agree to a contract of terms of service, get a username and password, and set up their connection. And that's it.

Wireless Projects is still working on a charging structure and is preparing a brochure for a larger blitz on other complexes, existing or about to be built, in the city.

Ideally, Mr Brennan likes to approach builders to see if they are interested in having wireless access added to the set of options an apartment buyer can choose to select.

Response from builders has been generally positive, he says, and in one case resulted in a side-contract to supply a wireless network to the builder on-site to enable the fast transfer of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprint drawings. The builder had dial-up access only and a single document could take two hours to transfer. Now it takes seconds.

"Another important channel for us is the estate agent network," says Mr Brennan. "They're our avenue to the management committees" in apartment and housing complexes.

He is starting to do presentations on supplying wireless connections at committees' annual general meetings. The firm hopes to secure deals with the committees to supply wireless at an annual cost that could then be passed on to residents as part of the general maintenance fee.

Mr Brennan is convinced his young company is at the right place at the right time.

"Even earlier this year, some people I spoke to felt it was too advanced a concept - a good concept, but the Irish market was a bit too young for this. But all that has really changed, even in the past three months."

Wireless Projects can be contacted at www.wirelessprojects.ie