Recently in Wi-Fi in the News Category

Nice to have an interesting contrarian position. Craig Mattias looks at the current bad news on muniwireless — read Earthlink — and takes the long view. WiFi will come because there is no other alternative. WiFi will come to complement the cellular network because WiFi is just better at delivering local wireless broadband, and is a global standard.

What could well happen, especially in an urban environment, is that public WiFi will become the victim of WiFi’s over all success. At Union Square, NYC for instance, where we have one of our parkwifi locations, WiFi Salon has detected 215 other nearby networks. They interfere with our coverage, and affect our QoS, and of course interfere with each other. This is open spectrum, so that’s the way it goes.

Advances in technology will increase performance/QoS, but there are real limitations when it comes to RF interference.

Covad has been great. New York City is a challenge, the parks are an even greater challenge, but we got it done. We got working DSL into 17 park locations and ADSL2+ into Columbus Circle, The Sheep Meadow, Washington Square Park, Summerstage, with Union Square pending and other locations also upgradable.

What does that mean for the user? Free high speed WiFi, with the capacity to support multimedia and a good number of simultaneous users. ADSL2+ tripled our capacity. Visit any of our free WiFi Hot Spots here.

Here is the rest of the press release, also available as a google search here.

, Wayport Among Providers That Rely on Covad's T1 and DSL to Connect Hotspots in Airports, Parks, and Other Public Areas

Here's something from the NYT opinion page on the announcement that ePath has been selected to provide Wi-Fi to L.I.

The editorial makes no mention of the fact that first ePath has to raise $150 million in capital. One wonders what the market is for venture capital for muniWiFi deployments given Earthlink's travails. Keyspan Energy, their backhaul partner (they will provide fiber) could well back them. The other partner, Cisco, has at least the gear. Perhaps with the $150 million, once they get it, they will be able to cover a projected 750 square miles, which would come out to 200K a square mile.

Here we go again, this time from Newsweek. We have been hit with the collective realization that for-pay citywide WiFi networks are not getting nearly enough subscribers to support the costs, and that QoS issues when covering large geographic areas and going in doors are driving up costs and undermining the value proposition.

In what seems to fly in the face of the new conventional wisdom post Earthlink's travails that large scale muni wireless deployments are dead, a franchise to build a muni-WiFi network over Nassau and Suffolk Counties was awarded to "newcomer" ePath to provide WiFi service.

You can read the Times article here.

ePath has an infrastructure partner in Cisco, and a fiber backhaul provider in Keyspan Energy, so they come to the table with something. All they need to do now is to raise $150 million dollars to build the network. Nassau / Suffolk will not be providing any funds or committing to purchase any services from ePath. It is all upon them to find the backers willing to take the risk.

The Wall Street Journal story is here.

As a purveyor of a WiFi Hot Spot network in 17 locations in ten NYC parks in 4 boroughs, WiFi Salon can well attest to the problem that leaves present in terms of providing reliable coverage.

The article is here. This is one of a spate of articles on how, having observed Earthlink’s frustrations, we need to find a new model for muniWiFi.

The poster, Alice LaPlante, notes that as a small business person she was disappointed to hear about all the delays.

Here, she hits on how muniWiFi should work — as an amenity for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Create Hot Zones for them. They congregate, dine, shop, build their businesses, hire. A great demographic to pursue.

The consumer play is one thing. The business improvement district play is another.

Saw an interesting article on how not to go about building muni networks — like the way we have been trying to do it here in the U.S. the past five years — by Stephen Lawson of IDG News Services.

You can find the Network World Article here.

Earthlink’s new CEO Rolla Hoff said on their Q2 Earnings Report conference call ( a $16.2 million loss) that they won’t be pursuing more muniWiFi business until they can figure out how to make money at it, and would going forward seek deals where the municipality would come in as an anchor tenant to help bootstrap the network.

Perhaps he is now looking for the kind of deals AT+T for instance has with Riverside California, where they will provide city services — police, fire, ambulance, security — in the 4.9 GHz spectrum — and them piggyback muni WiFi at 2.4GHz on top of that. Esme Voss is a big proponent of that model, and it makes sense.

In sum, for muniWiFi to work, the WISP has to have a suite of muni solutions that the local municipality is willing to implement. From that foundation, from that platform, you can layer on a public WiFi network.

The big mistake so far in muniWiFi has been that WISPs have tried to duplicate the cell network and provide universal coverage. WiFi is a different animal. We need to focus on creating WiFi Hot Zones at key locations throughout a community, and not try to cover the whole community indoors and out. Otherwise, we will run into a wall — no, many of them. The deployments and the customer service will be a magnitude more expensive, while user satisfaction will plummet.

Promise people a good strong signal within a limited area, and deliver it, say, in twenty locations in a small city and you have something people will want, especially as more start to actually own a WiFi enabled device.

From

CCTV.com

08-01-2007 15:48

“Hong Kong has taken a major step forward towards becoming a wireless city, with the official launch of its WiFi system on Tuesday. WiFi is short for wireless fidelity, which enables people to log on to the Internet and receive e-mails on the move.

Free WiFi will be rolled out at about 350 sites over the next two years. The Hong Kong SAR government will prioritize sites frequented by the public, including libraries, community centers, parks and government buildings. And the SAR welcomes industry players to participate in the program as contractors, and explore new business opportunities by providing more wireless applications and mobile products to residents.”

Notice that:

1. They are not trying to cover Hong Kong, but picking out 350 strategic locations.

2. Schools, government buildings, community centers, parks, are deemed strategic.

3. There are not enough devices in people’s hands, and not enough to do with them. A successful deployment depends on changing that.

That, in a nutshell is how WiFi Salon believes muniWiFi can best happen.

We are of course aware that such a network would be a “walled garden,” with web activities more easily monitored, and more readily correlated with location — for authoritarian governments and marketing executives, a valuable platform.

So how does one provide personalized, location-aware information, advertising, services, on one hand while retaining privacy on the other? The dream of ‘the internet everywhere’ may become the nightmare surveillance state. How do we navigate this? Another topic, to be sure.

Well, we all know the winning model for muniWiFi is not here yet. Here is the current litany of pain from Fast Company: Fast Cities Struggle to Go Wireless

People are discovering that WiFi cannot compete side by side with the telcos to provide universal broadband access over a large geographic area with anything like the QoS that people expect. Cell gives people universal coverage. They want their muniWiFi to provide it, especially if they are being asked to pay for it.

Mesh would be the way to go, except the attenuation (degradation of signal) between hops makes the technology — so far — not nearly as robust and cost effective as it needs to be. Earthlink/Philly/Tropos is what is cited as the main example.

What everyone seemed to forget as they were laying out their plans for a wireless municipal network is that WiFi by FCC regulation, and given where it is on the spectrum, doesn’t penetrate well — into buildings, through trees, down the hall, etc. People also forgot that this is open, unlicensed spectrum, subject to interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors, fish tanks (Wi Fi can’t penetrate water), other WiFi networks, etc.

WiFi itself was created by people who took the thin slice of free or junk spectrum alloted by the FCC and went with it well beyond what anyone could have anticipated. That said, there are continued limitations with WiFi that correspond to laws of physics. More robust spectrum at a higher power level is what is really needed.

In the meantime, let’s take what WiFi does well — provide local broadband connectivity. Let’s create a local wireless broadband experience within a neighborhood public space or commercial corridor.

Forget city networks. Too big, too bold, wrong paradigm for the spectrum you have been alloted. Dig “community wells” rather than trying to lay all the pipes necessary for “indoor plumbing.” Don’t go toe to toe with cable and the local telco and try to be the third player. You will lose because you will have a lot of the headaches and overhead of a telco — the in-house wired infrastructure, a large sales, marketing and customer service force — and not nearly the means given WiFi’s limitations to deliver a service that can compete in terms of price and quality, not with DSL prices continuing to drop, and I daresay $99 voice, cable and internet triple plays to be had at internet speeds far far higher than what WiFi would provide indoors.

We should try to instead create Community WiFi, as opposed to Consumer WiFi. Establish Hot Zones that are highly local, not mobile or municipal. WiFi Salon believes WiFi should be established the community’s centers — the schools, libraries, parks, public squares, the business districts. If you try to bring something to everyone everywhere, most certainly you will spend too much and still come up short because in the end you won’t be able to deliver enough to individual homes and offices. As a location-based service in key areas — well that is another matter.