Though MobileStar has been deploying both .11b and OpenAir wireless connections in hotels, airports and restaurants since 1997, it only has 170 sites up and running to date. "We plan to double that by the end of this month," said Ali Tabassi, chief technology officer at MobileStar. "The agreement with Starbucks is the most aggressive rollout plan by anyone to date, so we asked IBM to step up and help us," he said.

For its part, IBM will do the site survey, the electrical upgrades, the wireless LAN and Ethernet LAN deployment and the T1 connectivity. "The trick is to make it a turnkey solution for the average user who isn't a techie," said Dean Douglas, general manager of IBM's Mobile E-business Americas division.

IBM has worked with a number of companies deploying wireless technology to date, including infrared deployments with Parkstone (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) for medical facilities.

"MobileStar is interesting to IBM for two reasons," said Douglas. "The first is that they're going to be providing mobile wireless capability to companies so they can access their intranets from a number of different locations based on what their travel patterns are — airports, hotels and now Starbucks," he said. "The second reason is the aggressive nature of the rollout — 4,000 to 5,000 access points is a pretty large footprint."

Douglas sees the plan as an opportunity to give enterprises the chance to play with wireless technology without huge investments in adapting infrastructure or applications. "Or for that matter without changing out the end-user devices, as you just use a regular laptop with a PC Card," he said.

IBM itself plans to roll out ThinkPads later this year with .11b radios integrated on-board. In addition, said Douglas, as soon as Bluetooth becomes viable, IBM will combine Bluetooth with .11b radios. "We've talked with some companies about that, on two fronts. One is with modems that have the ability to go back and forth between both networks," said Douglas.

Of more immediate interest, IBM has also talked to Cisco about its mNet products. Essentially making a wireless LAN a PBX extension, Cisco's mNet allows the same device to be used for both wide-area and local-area networks.

"The point is that while talking on your cell phone (or whatever wide-area-network device you have), you don't pay for the bill while in the facility, but when you roam, you'd pay the cellular charge," said Douglas.

While mNet is GSM-based for now, it will migrate to GPRS later this year. Douglas doesn't see it as an IBM play though. "This [mNet] is really an opportunity for the telcos to create a very strong, sticky relationship with their enterprise clients. We'll work through the telcos," he said.