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News that's changing the Wireless World!
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Tuesday, July 29, 2003 |
Flickenger's Latest Edition. He's the man without fear, and he has a new book: Rob Flickenger, now of Seattle, has revised his Building Wireless Community Networks for a second edition. I haven't seen the new version yet, but you can read a sample chapter and view the latest table of contents. I liked the first version for its excitement, practical advice, and its broad horizons. The second edition looks so far like more of the how-to and practical along with more about how wireless elements work.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
1:03:15 PM 
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Free Pays More Than Fee?. Scott Rafer analyzes why free is cheaper to offer than for-fee hot spot service: This analysis is focused on the venue and operator, not the customer, in that billing and supporting customers costs, he says, $30/day/location versus $6/day/location for offering free service. Scott's analysis is sound except for one glaring omission: free doesn't carry a promise of service with it, and the promise of availability, support, security, and quality is what will -- if anything does -- make commercial Wi-Fi hot spots a continuing reality. A free hot spot or network could disappear tomorrow based on the whim of the venue or operator and their changing model. Free doesn't involve a contract that works both ways: for value, we provide service. Free is one way: here you go, and take what you can get. A for-fee system is more likely to be persistent and invest in innovation and special features because they have a motivation to retain and expand a subscriber base. But where does the subscriber base come from? From the kind of traveler who winds up spending a lot of time at captive venues: airports and hotels and conference centers. Captive venues may be unable to receive signals from Wi-Fi providers who aren't resident. And with reasonable 3G speeds further away (and some problems in using 2.5G inside concrete bunkers), captive Wi-Fi venues may remain captive. As I've said many times before, these captive venues will always be able to decide whether to charge a fee because of the near-term lack of alternatives. Although John Yunker of Pyramid Research expects that most hotels will ultimately offer Wi-Fi and broadband for free as just another amenity within a few years, because it will be expected, like a dial tone, he misses a side issue, too. Most analysts agree that there will continue to be a mix of fee and free hot spots, which means that business travelers will be forced to pay in many locations, especially airports. Which means that as prices drop, more travelers and corporations will find subscriptions more appealing, even if free service is available, because the free service may be in a forum non conveniens: a place hard to get to, as the lawyers call it. Roaming is inevitable, and once you have a linked roaming network with predictable fees -- a la Sprint PCS's latest view of the world -- then you build subscribers... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
12:43:39 PM
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Unsafe at Any Speed 2003. Cory Doctorow rips the Washington Post a new Ethernet port or two in eviscerating an article full of FUD: Listen, folks, how many people steal children away for any purpose? It's a small and horrible number. How much effort and money do we spend in our lives, those of us with and without children, ensuring that children are safe from this unlikely event that has dire outcomes? Individually, not so much; collectively, quite a bit. Cory Doctorow makes a good case as he tears apart a poorly researched Washington Post article on Wi-Fi security that all of the fear, uncertainty, and dread (FUD) that wireless security consultants are pushing isn't illegitimate, but it's misplaced. Just because someone can hop on your wireless network doesn't make them malevolent, any more than someone listening to your public conversation at a restaurant doesn't mean they're writing down what you say and selling it to the highest bidder. Yes, Wi-Fi makes need to make security better and simpler. And, you know what? They have. The article concludes with vague ideas about future security and mentions WEP, but ignores WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) which is appearing in shipping products and will be mandatory in all Wi-Fi branded gear by the end of the year. WPA fixes WEP's security holes and simplifies the use for home users: WPA can use a simple password instead of hexadecimal digits. The ultimately irony for all this article's overstatements and misdirections: guess which is the only company that ships a wireless gateway that tries to force the user to secure the network and even creates a floppy disk that can be used to configure other machines on the same network? Microsoft. Ah, the rich irony. Microsoft is using Wi-Fi internally more than practically any other company in the world, and they learned to make their dog food taste better and better.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
12:15:07 PM
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Israel Offers Unlicensed Lite. Israel loosens 2.4 GHz usage rules, allowing existing telecom firms to deploy Wi-Fi: These new rules don't allow just anyone to offer commercial Wi-Fi, but they do make it easier for existing companies to do so. Interestingly, ISPs can offer Wi-Fi directly to their customers, but apparently not to the general public.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
12:01:35 PM
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We're Not in the End Game Yet. Yadda yadda yadda hype yadda dotcom yadda yadda Wi-Fi: Another sort of tedious mainstream article that looks at the present state of Wi-Fi hot spots and extrapolates that no additional users will ever increase the pool of money, and disregards the piles of evidence I found in a Seattle Times article a few weeks ago that venues are seeing an increase in business. The bottom line in this piece is that it uses two reports to predict the future, and then looks at current numbers to explain why hot spots will fail. The Gartner report covered Europe and I think is ridiculously pessimistic. A hot spot CEO and I were talking the other day and he agreed with a statement I made: how many people have a Wi-Fi adapter in their laptop and don't use it? It begs to be used. Likewise, the scattered expensive hot spot market across Europe discourages high use, even though roaming is somewhat more prevalent than in the US. The reporter also cites John Yunker's report about the future of per-user revenue for hot spots versus other telecommunications' flavors. Yes, the report makes sense, but what the reporter ignores is that in his model there are a substantial number of users. The per-user revenue is driven down in part because the cost of providing service becomes lower and more models of offering service will flourish. I remember all the articles in 1997 timeframe that predicted the dotcom crash -- but for the wrong reason. They assumed that it was a fad and that no one would buy books from Amazon.com. In fact, the problem was basic business management and understanding how to scale to a profit with low margins, a fact that most ecommerce companies didn't understand. But the problem wasn't usage, interest, or (in many cases) actual revenue. No one knows whether any of the current models for Wi-Fi hot spots will pan out. But it's obvious that we're still at the very beginning of the curve: if the crash happens, it will happen big, with 10,000s of hot spots installed worldwide. If success happens, it will be equally large, with tens of millions of monthly subscribers worldwide. But we just won't know for at least three or four years what the end of this story is.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
12:01:10 PM
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Canada's Growth Spurt. Two announcements from Canada today: Second Cup's 400 stores go unwired and SaskTel Mobility installs service: The former deal with NetWireless will dramatically increase the hot spot availability across the country, while FatPort's latter deal with SaskTel is more of a platform arrangement in which SaskTel will use FatPort's backend to unwire Regina and Saskatoon airports among other venues. Update: FatPort's CEO wrote in to note that this is a twofer for FatPort, because NetWireless is another virtual hot spot operating (VHO, in their terminology) that uses FatPort's technology.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
11:58:07 AM
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Wi-Fi/Wild-Fire. Coyote wild fire fought with help of wireless network: The folks in San Diego who brought us the world's longest link -- and then had to back down their power a bit when they realized they were over the legal limits -- have turned their powers once again to good in helping firefighters maintain communications and remote imaging using a series of wireless links. The National Science Foundation apparently provides some of the funding for the HPWREN project. [via TechDirt]... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
11:52:35 AM
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Pennsylvania 2-4000!. Penn. ISP to offer unlimited wireless for $9.95 per month subscription throughout several counties: One of PSINet's founders is partnering with PaOnline, a 12,000-customer ISP to deploy Wi-Fi hot spots in Harrisburg and throughout Dauphin County. The cost of 128 Kbps Wi-Fi will be bundled with existing dial-up service, apparently, which is $9.95 per month. Higher speeds might cost more in the future. The city is also rolling out its own service, but at $9.95/month with dial-up, the PaOnline deal will be hard to beat, even for free. The Wi-Fi entrepreneur says a hot zone can be created on about 48 hours notice -- true, and then the backhaul will take several months unless they're using wireless meshing or back-haul. [via Ross Karchner]... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
11:52:14 AM
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Still Puzzling over This One. Is Tartara offering more than a turnkey box wired to Wayport's network?: I can't tell what Wayport's role in this announcement is. It sounds like Tartara has a turnkey hot spot box with backend authentication and billing, and is using Wayport's network (in trials) to demonstrate a seamless branded overlay. But it doesn't mention other networks, and Wayport's footprint is only one part of a larger network that any carrier would build out. It also seems like the market for Tartara's offering is small if Sprint PCS is one of the companies they cite as a good fit. Insight, anyone? (Use the comments feature below.)... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
11:34:22 AM
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Last Update: 8/6/2003; 6:19:15 PM
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