(Updated - see more
recent posting. [Link re-pointed to re-posted article.])
Jim Thompson, the former Director of Product Development at Vivato has written a damning commentary on a large deployment of Vivato systems in downtown Spokane, Washington. Thompson writes in part:
Kids there is NO WAY to make this work in unlicensed spectrum. Most of what is wrong with Vivato is that Bob Conley hasn't given up on the wet dream of wireless residential broadband.
Thompson's rant continues: Its a little-known fact that the whole reason for Mabuhay/Vivato's existance is that Bob and Skip couldn't get anything but dial-up in Liberty Lake, WA. So these two Agilent engineers decided that they could build a phased-array 802.16 device (Vivato's telephone number still contains a reference to 802.16) and unwire the masses. The VCs wouldn't fund a 802.16 company, but WiFi was hot, so Mabuhay became an 802.11 company.
But there is a big problem: 802.11 is a listen-before-send protocol. If an 802.11 device detects an 802.11 signal (or even a high-enough level of any signal on or near the channel its operating on), it will decide that the channel is in-use (the 802.11 standard calls this CCA (clear channel assesment), and not send.
Thompson's statements corroborate some information I received in April that the Vivato Spokane deployment wasn't all it was purported to be. Excerpts from the message from my source:
[Vivato employees] have been warned to keep their resumes tuned up because the company is not sure its going to be around much longer. They are selling their units at a loss, even at the bizarrely high price they go for. The cost to build each of the units meets or exceeds the sale price, which is definitely a harbinger of death for any company. There is no real secret that the company is money starved, having quickly burned through the $64 mil they got last year in 2nd round funding.
Vivato is building a lesser model of the one approved by the FCC. Now boasting only 20 radio/antenna pairs, it isn't the device that it was cracked up to be. Where the prototypes played pretty nicely with other users of the frequency, these fellas are simply high powered foghorns --and the same exact job they do could be done with much less expensive equipment without losing a bit of utility. That assumes that other equipment would be permitted to blast out a 52dB signal as the Vivatos are waivered to do.
[There is serious convern about] the close relationship between Vivato and the City of Spokane. The city is investing fairly heavily in Vivato equipment as part of the WiFi-everywhere that Spokane wants to build. There are two reasons for this concern. The first and foremost is that they don't want [the City of Spokane] investing in a company that isn't going to be around to support their product. Second, they're perplexed as to why this project was developed without a single offer to any existing companies that already have a sufficient infrastructure to bid on it.
While I felt that Vivato had considerable potential... that's now almost spent, apparently, the larger principle at work is the incredible innovation at work in the Broadband Wireless Internet Access industry. Vivato's passing will leave a void for only a short time.
As Thompson points out, the new hot technology for deploying Wi-Fi everywhere is mesh networking; amply evidenced by the amazing number of new Dynamic Wireless Mesh Network companies.
Steve Stroh
Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh except for Thompson excerpt. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.