Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) News

GDBWIA 2008-03-20 - No Significant BWIA News, So I Wax Philosophic

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? As the title says, I wasn't able to scare up much in the way of significant BWIA News. There's news, of course - but scanning through it, nothing signficant enough to bring to your attention.

So, I thought I'd take a few paragraphs to wax philosophic about the interplay between Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and wireless telephony (cellular) - how I see it all playing out.

Over the decade I've been writing about Broadband Wireless Internet Access, I've developed two inherent biases. The first is that the Internet has become (past tense) the source of most of the content (including applications) that people want to access, consume, read, use etc. The second is that I've come to believe, absolutely, in the Stupid Network principle first espoused by David Isenberg. I believe that both of those biases not only apply to Broadband Wireless Internet Access, but are even more powerfully "in effect" for Broadband Wireless Internet Access than they are in effect for Broadband "Landline" Internet Access.

GDBWIA 2008-03-19 700 MHz Auctions Done... Next Up From That... Not Much

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Apologies for no Good Day, BWIA updates lately - I've been preoccupied.

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? 700 MHz auctions are done, netting something like US $19.5B. What excites me is that we'll no longer have to hear the breathless, clueless hype about how 700 MHz will "change things" for Broadband. In most other aspects, the revenue is notable, but for the US Federal Government, not so much. That's what, less than a month of operations in Iraq? More to the point in the wireless industry, that's a mere 2/3rds of what Sprint declared it has lost because of acquiring Nextel. So... the revenue from the 700 MHz auctions isn't going to significantly change anything, like what might happen if it was applied to a fund that provides subsidies for universal deployment of Broadband Internet Access at a minimum of 5 Mbps to all... or anything.

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Apologies for no Good Day, BWIA updates lately - I've been preoccupied.

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? 700 MHz auctions are done, netting something like US $19.5B. What excites me is that we'll no longer have to hear the breathless, clueless hype about how 700 MHz will "change things" for Broadband. In most other aspects, the revenue is notable, but for the US Federal Government, not so much. That's what, less than a month of operations in Iraq? More to the point in the wireless industry, that's a mere 2/3rds of what Sprint declared it has lost because of acquiring Nextel. So... the revenue from the 700 MHz auctions isn't going to significantly change anything, like what might happen if it was applied to a fund that provides subsidies for universal deployment of Broadband Internet Access at a minimum of 5 Mbps to all... or anything.

GDBWIA 2008-03-12/13 Live By The (Open) Source, Die By Same

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? Open-Mesh! (Not quite sure what the organization / company's name is - Open-Mesh.com? They don't quite get around to saying...) What Meraki was and should have remained - a do-what-you-want-with-it-the-way-you-want low-cost Wi-Fi mesh network system. $49/node, cheaper if you buy a lot. A web-based hosted dashboard system if you want it, or put different / better firmware onto it if you want that. Meraki created the market of turnkey hardware, build-the-network-yourself Wi-Fi mesh networking, and then fumbled it tragically by forcing new terms and conditions on new purchasers by forcing ads, etc. DailyWireless.org's Sam Churchill said it very well - (Meraki) pissed off a lot of people. To paraphrase an old saw about the Internet treating censorship as damage and routing around it, open source treats stupidity like Meraki's onerous changes as "damage" and creates a new product to fill the void. I had personally not quite gotten around to buying into Meraki before they made the onerous changes (investing my "fun" Christmas-present-to-me funds into a OLPC XO [which has finally arrived]). One potential crossover is that both the OLPC XO and Open-Mesh use open software to achieve their meshing function... potentially, both systems' meshing technique could be brought together and made interoperable. Well, we can at least hope that those capable of doing this would see the wisdom, fun, and utility of that.

GDBWIA 2008-03-11 Ericsson's Clueless Prediction Of Demise Of Wi-Fi HotSpots

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.). 

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today?  Ericsson predicts demise for hot spots Oh... this is so deliciously clueless! (Ericsson's position, not the article) First, the analogy with telephone booths is horribly flawed - telephone booths served only one function, to shelter a phone and its user from the elements, for a totally dedicated service - voice. It wasn't good for any other purpose. A Wi-Fi HotSpot, especially coffee shops, serve multiple functions, including Broadband Internet Access. This was just too easy an illustration of how flawed Ericsson's view is: In the room where Bergendahl spoke, there was no 3G coverage. However, operators are looking    at ways to provide better signal coverage, particularly indoors and in rural areas. But here's the primary reason I think that Wi-Fi HotSpots will not only continue, but thrive - a clueful Wi-Fi HotSpot operator (Starbucks / AT&T* / Apple) won't continue to throttle the Wi-Fi HotSpot minimal backhaul speeds like a mere T-1; they'll upgrade that backhaul connection to make it compelling for users to come into range of a Wi-Fi HotSpot for a "download fix", like downloading a handful of movies to their (soon, I'd guess) 64 GB iPhone. Not to mention, there's considerable motivation for AT&T, operating both Starbucks' Wi-Fi HotSpots and a wireless telephony data network populated by lots of eager-to-download iPhone users. For example, Towerstream's current promotion  is 8 Mbps for $999/month (delivered via BWIA, of course). Multiples of 10 Mbps aren't that horribly expensive, especially in urban areas where there's actual competitive broadband from fiber.

* Disclaimer for using AT&T and clueful in the same sentence - I continue to contend that AT&T is overall clueless about Broadband Wireless Internet Access, both wireless telephony and Mobile WiMAX, but Apple's corporate butt-kicking influence from the iPhone partnership seems to be compensating at least somewhat.

GDBWIA 2008-03-10 - Intel Discovers WISP Technology

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.). 

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? Well, amused, and slightly sad more than excited. Sam Churchill of DailyWireless.org writes about Intel-funded research into wireless technologies that could be effective in providing connectivity to rural areas of lesser-developed countries.

This is the part that leapt out at me from Churchill's article: A key component of this solution is a variation on IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) technology. While the 802.11 Media Access Control (MAC) protocol was not designed for long-distance communications, researchers believe that modifying the MAC layer should resolve the problem, without the need for hardware or driver modifications. Sad, because this is in no way, shape, or form "news" or even significant "research" because such modifications of the 802.11 MAC for outdoor, long-range links have been in use in the Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), industry since I've been writing about it, more than ten years now.

GDBWIA 2008-03-06 - The iPhone (3rd Party Apps) Cometh!

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? Well, the iPhone / iPod Touch just got a lot more interesting. My "enterprise wireless" slant is up at Tech Republic's Mobile and Wireless Blog - Apple (finally discusses iPhone / iPod Touch Software Development Kit. My agreement with TechRepublic is that I don't "compete" with the stories I write for them, so I don't have anything to add here, but I will add some emphasis that if you were skeptical that the iPhone was compelling, factor together the "iFund", the new 16 GB iPhone / 32 GB iPod Touch, and the upcoming "3G" iPhone due this year, and wow... what an interesting, cool, genuinely useful device it's going to be.

GDBWIA 2008-03-04/05 - BWIA Networks (Will Be) Bigger In India

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? A new Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) network announced for India - Mobile WiMAX, of course. At first this seemed like yet another breathless announcement of intent to deploy Mobile WiMAX, but India seems like the new Texas - everything's bigger in India. The best overall summary is a press release at Telsima; I couldn't find an equivalent press release on Tata Group's sprawling web site.

The basics seem to be that the deploying company is Tata Communications, one of the many subsidiaries of Tata Group, about which is pretty interesting reading all by itself. The only thing comparable to it that I read of are the chaeobols (sp?) in South Korea.  The system vendor is Telsima, a WiMAX-focused vendor based in Silicon Valley, but apparently founded with the vision of becoming a dominant WiMAX vendor in India. Tata Communications projects to invest $500M to deploy networks in fifteen Indian cities by the end of 2008; they claim to have networks already up in ten cities. The press release makes some interesting claims about Plans to roll out WiMAX in 110 cities       for Enterprise       and 15 Cities for Retail Segment by 2008.

This statement is pretty soberly understated: The Indian broadband market, which today serves only 3.1 million customers in a nation with a population of over 1.2 billion, is forecast to grow significantly. Yes, I'd concur, that big a market, with that little existing Broadband Internet Access penetration would grow significantly.

GDBWIA 2008-03-03 - NanoStation - BWIA for $79

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.). 

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? Ubiquiti Networks NanoStation (pictured at right)! It's a Broadband Wireless Internet Access (outdoor) client radio in a form factor that looks a lot like Motorola Canopy with integral multiple antenna selections, a 2.4 GHz version, and a 5 GHz version. The most amazing thing about these units is that their MSRP is $79 (for the 2.4 GHz version; price unstated on the 5 GHz version. My impression, overall, is that these units are derived from Ubiquiti's intensive adaptations of Atheros "Wi-Fi" chipsets for outdoor / long-range / BWIA use. Ubiquiti is hardly alone in doing so; I've had reports over the years that major BWIA vendors (in the top 5) have also used adapted Atheros "Wi-Fi" chipsets. I put Wi-Fi in quotes here because the Atheros chipsets can be programmed to operate in ways incompatible with Wi-Fi (but better, for BWIA usage), such as channel sizes as small as 5 MHz compared to Wi-Fi standard 20 and 22 MHz channels. I hope to do an in-depth article of the NanoStation products for WISPNews. My thanks to Ken DiPietro, and Drew Lentz for bringing this to my attention.

GDBWIA 2008-02-29 Sprint Declares Loss Greater Than GDP Of Oman

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.).

And we say goodbye to my least favorite month in the calendar.

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? Excited... that's not the right word... stunned gets closer. I've been outspoken about Sprint Nextel's problems as context for it to be near-impossible that Sprint Nextel could widely deploy it's Xohm Mobile WiMAX service in its 2.5 GHz spectrum in parallel with its existing CDMA wireless telephony network on 1.9 GHz (leaving only the terms and conditions of the surrender of their 2.5 GHz spectrum to Clearwire). But for Sprint Nextel (I guess I'll start just calling them Sprint now that they've essentially written off the value of acquiring Nextel) to declare a US $29.5B loss yesterday?!?!?! That simply strains credulity. Sprint lost more money than the entire country of Oman's 2007 GDP (link - right column, CIA Factbook)!!!

Then there's Sprint's "we'll make up the losses in volume" $99/month "everything" plan. You can read the PR spinmeistering, but (yesterday) try going to Sprint's web site and looking up the actual particulars of the plan as if you might possibly become a new customer, and you find... nothing about the new plan.  Today, there's an ad, and I still can't really parse out the particulars. Do you get a phone that bridges the Sprint CDMA voice, 1xEV-DO Internet access, and Nextel voice networks? And get access to everything, including (falsetto trembling voice...) exclusive Sprint video? Yawn. Another thing leaped out at me - Sprint's "Everything" offer expires at the end of May. Double Yawn - this is business as usual in the wireless telephony industry, and this kind of jerking around of the customers with teaser offers that expire will just drive customers to true flat-rate offers of Internet and voice. Obligatory BWIA - that this incredible declared loss for Sprint seals the fate of Xohm... how could they conceivably build out a Mobile WiMAX nework (that would have any scale) when Sprint is scrambling to "keep going" by using a US $2.5B loan?

Good Day, BWIA - Wednesday 2008-02-27 Stelara Wireless Reincarnates Monet Mobile Wireless Business Model

Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is 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.). As always, thanks for being "one of the five".

Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? I'm late to the party on taking note of Stelera Wireless LLC, a Broadband Wireless Internet Access Service Provider (BWIA SP) using new Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum (1.7 / 2.1 GHz) to provide Broadband Internet Access in rural areas. They're using HSPA - Broadband over Wireless Telephony based on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) technology.

Good spectrum - it will eventually be well-supported because it's adjacent to the heavily used (worldwide) 1.9 GHz "PCS" wireless telephony band and there were bigger players like T-Mobile USA that bought in. That means Stelera will be able to buy systems and devices off-the-shelf. Bad news... they'll be buying them from very large vendors like (Om Malik reports) Nokia Siemens Networks who are more used to dealing with, and pricing their systems, for very large wireless telephony carriers. Let's hope that the principals of Stelera have done ample due diligence from a previous high-profile incarnation of this same business model - Monet Mobile Networks. Both chose to use wireless telephony spectrum for purely Broadband Internet Access services in rural markets. Monet ultimately failed when they couldn't achieve sufficient scale to be able to afford the overhead of having bought licensed wireless telephony spectrum.