It's Monday, November 26, 2007 - a good day for asteroid-spotting. Welcome back to Good Day, BWIA, a light compendium of news, items of interest, irreverent commentary, and occasional light analysis relating to Broadband Wireless Internet Access (including WiMAX, public access Wi-Fi, etc.).
NextPhase and GigaBeam to unwire Los Angeles county and Orange County for 1 Gbps communications Well, if you're going to build a brand-new network, might as well build it for real speed. If you factor in that moviemaking and media are one of the primary businesses in this area, this makes a lot of sense as video production, including movies, have now shifted entirely to digital and high-definition digital, so moving those files around with conventional telecom "pipes" can take a while. Covad (which acquired NextWeb, Inc. in 2005) and Towerstream are dominant Broadband Wireless Internet Access providers in the Los Angeles area, both with better scale and deeper pockets than NextPhase, not to mention (precious, expensive, time-consuming-to-negotiate) roof rights and fiber access. So, NextPhase starting its network buildout at a minimum of 1 Gbps makes a lot of sense... but there's nothing to prevent Covad or Towerstream from doing the same. Towerstream already has done some 1 Gbps links, but Covad executives are probably trying to figure out why they would need 1 Gbps links to service its VOIP telephony customers. It's amusing to watch efforts such as this one continue to siphon off lucrative business customers for T-1-and-up services in major markets from incumbent wireline carriers AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest; they're standing still in comparison.
Today's Clearwire Modem Weather Report - Hollywood Hill, Woodinville, Washington - Solid 3 Bars; another chilly, foggy, frost-on-the-foliage morning.
One building provides wireless services to one-third of New Zealand While the cited story is about challenges to a proposed new skyscraper in Auckland, New Zealand, some of the wireless statistics about Sky Tower, claimed to be the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere, are really impressive:
- 400 licensed services and radio communications facilities
- 2 television stations (that's all? All but one television station in NYC had their transmitter on the World Trade Center)
- 22 FM radio stations
- Land, Mobile, Marine, and Broadband Wireless services
It sounds like it will be an interesting fight; while lawsuits about blocking existing views are commonplace, this is the first regulatory action I've heard of that would require a new structure to maintain the wireless communications equivalent of existing views.
Amusing related personal experience - Rocky Ahmann of Aspen Communications (now apparently subsumed into a hosting company) once gave me a tour of the tallest building in Dallas, Texas which was the wireless equivalent of a "fiber nexus" for that part of Texas. It was awesome - the top two "floors" of this building were actually a wireless-transparent facade, so almost all the wireless systems located there "lived indoors" out of the weather - from massive Harris microwave links to Motorola Canopy gear of small Wireless ISPs. The wireless systems benefited from an unobstructed "RF view" for 360 degrees. What was most impressive was a plot hanging on a wall of projected coverage from there at 450 MHz... extending all the way to the Oklahoma border to the North, which Mapquest cites as 213 miles.
Wireless industry angst over new FCC requirements for minimum backup power Two things surprised me about this development, mandated in the wake of massive communications network failures during and after Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. First, that the FCC's requirement for wireless carriers to provide backup power was so minimal - 24 hours of backup power for central offices, and merely 8 hours of backup power for wireless communications sites and other key facilities outside a central office; especially that the FCC felt that they had to mandate such requirements. Second, and more damning... that wireless carriers are vehemently opposing having such minimal requirements mandated upon them. Many Broadband Wireless Internet Access Service Providers I've talked to over the past decade of writing about BWIA don't consider that they've adequately protected their systems and networks unless they've engineered for power losses extending three days to a week!
Remember Arcnet? Neither does Craig Mathias in considering the future of BWIA Craig Mathias argues that There Will Be No Single Wireless Broadband Technology. For the moment, he's right; we'll continue to not only have HSPA, 1xEV-DO, Mobile WiMAX, Wi-Fi, and even iBurst. I've argued the same, that we'll continue to have not only standards-based BWIA systems, but also proprietary systems that serve niches not addressed by the standards-based systems. But if we ignore some relevant history in wired networking, we lose some valuable insight into how BWIA is likely to evolve. Ethernet absolutely wiped out other usable wired networking technologies such as Arcnet and Token Ring. I think the reason that happened is that Ethernet was simply easier for a plethora of vendors to build compliant products, and it became rapidly more cost-effective than the alternatives. That, and the market "wanted" one dominant standard. I think the same scenario holds true for BWIA in the long run; Mobile WiMAX looks to be the 100-base-T Ethernet of Broadband Wireless Internet Access. If you seamlessly meld Mobile WiMAX with Wi-Fi for their complementary capabilities, as Intel plans to do, "baking" both into a single chipset, the combination would neatly eclipse the wireless telephony BWIA systems. There's going to be more BWIA bought in the coming decade because of China, India, and other populous developing nations than what has been invested in wireless telecommunications to date; that will tip the cost-effectiveness of Mobile WiMAX in favor of Mobile WiMAX / Wi-Fi. For the customer, changing wireless services is as simple as buying a (cheaper, better, faster) device; they care nothing (nor should they) about how much a legacy carrier has invested in their legacy infrastructure.
By Steve Stroh
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(Last updated 2007-11-06)
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
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