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Azulstar once pinned its fortunes on city-wide Wi-Fi, but now looks to a special licensed spectrum band to make WiMax work where Wi-Fi failed: Azulstar has been the also-ran in Wi-Fi for some years, I’ll just state bluntly and upfront. They built a network in Grand Haven, Mich., in 2003 that’s one of—if not the—longest running metro-scale Wi-Fi networks in the world designed for public access. The mayor of Grand Haven since 2003, Roger Bergman, told me, “I got on board personally right away, and I am still on.”
Azulstar soon answered several RFPs and partnered up with major firms to bring Wi-Fi to Rio Rancho, N.M., Winston-Salem, N.C., Sacramento, Calif., and most notably Silicon Valley—a set of dozens of cities along with county government and private enterprise all wanting some kind of tiered Wi-Fi across 1,500 sq mi.
While EarthLink, MetroFi, and even Kite Networks (with their extensive Arizona buildout in Tempe launched a bit before any other large competiting network) seized the headlines, and later made news about their stalls, failures, and exits, Azulstar seemed quietly to sink into the sand. The Wireless Silicon Valley deal fell apart, as did Sacramento after efforts to get stakeholder and outside investment seemed to fail to materialize, and the marquee partners—Cisco, IBM, and Intel—just wouldn’t step up to the plate to make the project move forward. Azulstar was the lead techology firm, but the money just didn’t come. (Both California projects are moving forward with a different set of partners and expectations now.)
Rio Rancho was perhaps one of the biggest letdowns. City manager Jim Payne explained in an interview a few weeks ago, “They had a number of things that were going against them from the start, and they did make an attempt to meet the requirements of the contract.” But Rio Rancho voted to not just terminate the contract after years of attempts to make the network work, but rejected a proposal from Azulstar a few weeks ago to switch over equipment on the poles. Azulstar now has to remove all its devices.
All of this might make the typical company head a bit depressed about his firm’s future, and less than sanguine about the potential for wireless broadband to work at all. Not so for Tyler van Houwelingen, Azulstar’s chief, and I have to admit that he convinced me that the wireless provider has a fighting chance, due to a good combination of timing, spectrum policy, and a large dollop of can-do spirit.
Continue reading "Can Azulstar Make WiMax Work without Buying Spectrum?"
Posted by Glennf at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
Cablevision will offer free Wi-Fi to its customers across a swath of New York: The company will spend an astounding $350m over two years—roughly $100 per customer—to put in service that they peg at offering 1.5 Mbps downstream rates. Broadband subscribers to their Optimum Online broadband service, which has rates of 15/2 and 30/5 Mbps. Others will pay for access. The company has 3.1m cable customers in New York.
This is the first large-scale Wi-Fi network announced that had no public/private component to it. While Verizon once said they’d blanket New York City with payphone-based Wi-Fi nodes, that never materialized, and it was unclear how seamless the coverage would ever be. This is a full-blown metro-scale network that’s not beholden to any political interest, and which can likely use mounting rights already available to Cablevision. (In the past, I’ve said this, and folks have said that franchising agreements would exclude additional mounted equipment of this kind. Years later, I have to say I’ve never found anything to support that opinion, but welcome more documented information in the comments.)
The idea is for Wi-Fi to act as a mobile broadband component for Cablevision, to dilute the impact of the Sprint/Clearwire deal announced yesterday. While cable companies rarely compete in a given territory, the Sprint/Clearwire joint venture will make it easier for a customer to get home and mobile broadband and voice from one company, and then turn to another firm for video. This buys Cablevision a quadruple play (voice, video, data, mobile broadband) with a future quintuple play by adding (as they say they will) voice over Wi-Fi service.
Sources indicate that BelAir equipment will be used, which makes sense given BelAir’s release nearly three years ago of a cable-plant compatible Wi-Fi node designed essentially for precisely this contingency. This is a nice win for BelAir, which will likely be selling somewhere north of 15,000 nodes based on the coverage area and service described. BelAir gear also powers Minneapolis, the only successfully completed big-city Wi-Fi network in North America.
Posted by Glennf at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)
Mayor Bill White says $3.5m of EarthLink’s $5m default payment for failing to build Wi-Fi network goes to bubbles of service: 10 low-income parts of Houston will gain Wi-Fi service to bring Internet access where it’s otherwise unavailable. They’ll start with what he calls bubbles—actually, that’s a nicer term than “hotzones,” which sounds like an unpleasant bodily sensation—and hope to link those together. Gulton in southwest Houston comes first.
Tropos is donating gear for this first bubble. They lost out fairly big-time when EarthLink bumped the Houston contract, which was estimated at $50m to fulfill. Tropos would have seen thousands of their nodes deployed in Houston. This is a good way for them to generate good will and keep their name in front of future providers.
Houston Chronicle tech journalist Dwight Silverman wonders if this could help reignite citywide Wi-Fi, and notes that Houston issued an RFI (request for information) that looks for a new operator to build service out. My take is that Houston is far too rangy to ask for anything like near-complete coverage (a requirement in the contract EarthLink signed), and these new efforts and the new RFI might reflect a better sense of financial and technical reality.
As EarthLink’s CEO Rolla Huff said in an interview with me last summer about contracts such as Houston’s, “We were providing coverage to cattle. It didn’t make good business sense.”
This effort dovetails with an RFI issued by a coalition in Broward County, Flor., to built out 1,000 sq mi of service. It’s not naive, unlike a lot of earlier proposals (viz., Miami-Dade’s failed effort). The OneBroward effort links the county, colleges and universities, the school district, two health-care providers, and the county sheriff. They’re now actively soliciting private-sector partners. This is a coalition, not a network by executive fiat that fails to materialize. (The blog I link to is written by Lev Gonick, who was a big force beyond Cleveland’s OneCommunity effort that radiated out from his employer, Case University.)
Posted by Glennf at 1:53 PM | Comments (1)
Longmont, Colo., network transferred from Kite Networks to Ohio firm DHB Networks: The Longmont City Council gave Kite’s contracts to DHB, which gives them access to city-owned fiber and utility poles, and connects them to services DHB can sell the city. Although specifics of the Kite deal weren’t noted in this story, I know from Tempe that a lot of what’s at stake is leasing agreements; DHB may be taking over leases and making payments current, or may have negotiated a discount so that the leasing firm is getting something instead of a default. DHB will also take over the Farmers Branch, Tex., network previously operated by Kite.
Milpitas, Calif., considers next steps in wake of EarthLink’s near-term exit from municipal business: The Bay Area city contracted with EarthLink for public safety services, as well as encouraging public access.
Posted by Glennf at 4:03 PM | Comments (0)
New life in Wireless Silicon Valley? The San Jose Mercury News reports that Covad has stepped into the mix of firms that won the contract to build out the vast Wireless Silicon Valley project. The firm will work with Cisco to build a three-month, one-square-mile test network in San Carlos. However, if the test results in a network being built, Covad will focus on business and governmental customers—no consumer public access is planned.
A few weeks ago, I predicted the project was completely dead because there was no money, no funding sources, no focus, and the major partners (IBM and Cisco) seemed unwilling to put in their own funds to jumpstart the effort.
In the interim, Azulstar, the junior partner that was in charge of running the project and gaining funding, was pushed out of Metro Connect Sacramento, and Intel and Cisco agreed to provide $750,000 in equipment loans to get things going there.
I had wondered for some time why companies with the reputation and scale of IBM, Cisco, and Intel weren’t going to the mat for the Silicon Valley project, given how embarrassing it should have been for them to have a proposal such as that fail. It highlights how these blue-chip companies put their names on proposals, when their real contribution is providing equipment loans and strategic advice, rather than real participation.
This news out of the Mercury News notes that Covad entered the business wireless broadband market through an acquisition in 2006, so it’s not that strange for the company to test the waters here.
Posted by Glennf at 7:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Minneapolis Star Tribune cautiously expressed optimism at US Internet’s network: When I spoke to the editorial writer—I’m quoted briefly in this unsigned piece—about Minneapolis, I stressed that I don’t have feet on the street, but I do have, uh, feet in my inbox. When things don’t work in various places, with various services, or with various products, I do hear about it. Thank you, loyal readers. I usually know a few hours to a few days before something collapses, or when a product is utterly unfabulous from a Wi-Fi perspective.
And I don’t get email with the anger, disappointment, or even intellectual curiosity about Minneapolis, in the same way I did about Philadelphia, San Francisco, or Tempe. Which leads me to believe either no one reads my site in the Twin Cities (a possibility), or that the network is performing more or less—note the more or less—as the reporting and US Internet indicates it is.
Which must be highly gratifying to the firm when they read this local pat on the back. The paper isn’t trying to be dubious. Rather, it’s not entirely clear why US Internet succeeded where so many other firms have failed. There are at least three distinctive elements to US Internet’s deployment: they are using BelAir equipment, which is used in none of the large-scale networks that have failed to be built or that are faltering; they were signed up in order for Minneapolis to be an anchor tenant of a considerable dollar value (Houston being the only network of that scale, but much more expensive to build); and Minneapolis agreed to make upfront payments against future services to help US Internet finance and build out the network.
Posted by Glennf at 9:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A small firm in suburban Missouri is building out a neighborhood at a time: Network 1 is building in bits and pieces, signing up customers as they go. This strategy might work. It’s less capital intensive, although you still have the cost of building a network operation center and your backbone network; it’s just that it can be built piecemeal. It also means that problems with technology or assumptions can be corrected as the network is built and as customers start using it.
I don’t want to sound too optimistic: there are still plenty of technical, political, and financial obstacles in the way of having metro-scale Wi-Fi work. But I do think the days of 95-percent city buildout requirements led by municipalities that don’t contribute any funding or buy any services are over. It’s more likely that we’ll see a combination of public space unwiring, business-grade point-to-multipoint broadband wireless, and something like reverse redlining: Wi-Fi brought to areas with high dial-up penetration and poor broadband availability, likely in lower-income parts of cities.
The company so far has just 150 customers and 10 square miles of service area—although it’s unclear how fully unwired that coverage is. That’s a pretty tiny number, and we now have to see if the network remains reliable and scales as users join.
The folks at Network 1 are using some kind of homebrew equipment, but the results so far seem fine. Tim Logan, the reporter at St. Louis Post-Dispatch who wrote the linked story, said the firm was playing it close to the vest as to what gear they were using, but that they were employing off-the-shelf equipment. I expect that RoamAD or LocustWorld is being used for the routing portion of their network.
Posted by Glennf at 8:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Before it really began, the Dade County, Flor., wireless effort shuts down: Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Alvarez has dropped his plans for an ambitious county-wide network after the departure of a key aide. It seems that WiMax was always part of the thinking for this 2,000 sq mi network, but Alvarez was optimistically relying on the separately politically organized county school board to give them valuable 2.5 GHz frequency for use! Rather than, you know, lease it to Sprint or Clearwire for tens of millions of dollars. Very optimistic.
I’m quoted in the articles saying that there are no successful countywide initiatives anywhere in the world (replace county with similar political units where unavailable). I can’t think of a one; all I know of are abandoned plans and struggling projects likely to shut down.
The mayor is quoted stating, incorrectly, “Several communities before us attempted to do too much too soon, only to learn that their models were impractical, and more importantly, costly to taxpayers.” That’s really wrong. In all the Wi-Fi networks across the U.S., only a handful involved more than a few tens of thousands of dollars, and even in those cases, there was typically a public benefit. St. Louis Park, Minn., Chaska, Minn., and St. Cloud, Flor., are the most notable examples of public dollars spent to build networks; each is a relatively small town, and each has a different story to tell about outcomes.
A few large hotzones in Miami-Dade will still be built.
Posted by Glennf at 9:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The final curtain has fallen on the ambitious St. Louis Park, Minn., Wi-Fi network: The city claims the contractor did a terrible job in planning and deploying the network, especially since the vendor received the contract through a low bid based on using solar-powered nodes. The city found the nodes were placed poorly for charging, and that the company, Arinc, used “the wrong locations” and “the wrong materials,” according to the CIO.
It’s a sad situation, the Star Tribune says, “that council and staff members said has ‘sickened’ them.” The city owns the network, and had hired Arinc, which in turn contracted some local operations. Arinc is a large firm which has previously built Wi-Fi networks, but not using solar power. The city has spent to $800,000 on the network , but the story says the city might sue Arinc to recover this. It would cost $3m to build the rest of the network out, the city says, a far cry from the $1.7m that Arinc bid.
Some small part of the additional cost had to do with a redesign of the tall poles on which solar panels were mounted after residents complained about the garish appearance. They’re breathing a sigh of relief now that they know their reportedly pretty town won’t be festooned with such stakes.
Regarding the poles, the mayor had some choice language on the subject: ” ‘We’re going to tell Arinc, “Come get your poles, take them out of the ground, stick them someplace where the solar panels won’t work at all,” ’ Mayor Jeff Jacobs said.”
Posted by Glennf at 7:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
We’re long past the beginning of the end, and we’re nearing the end of the end for the built-it-first, figure-revenue-later model of municipal Wi-Fi: For two years, MetroFi has had the contract for Aurora, Ill., among the first cities to electrify its streetlights (1881). Delays due to utility poles have kept the network from growing fast for some time. Now, according to local papers, MetroFi is requiring a $3.5m contract over five years to cover public safety wireless costs or it won’t complete the ad-supported, free public access network. Only 20 percent of the network has been built, and no work has been done since June.
MetroFi confirmed via email that the company won’t build the networks out further, noting through a spokesperson, “Everyone involved has been aware of the change in the industry model for quite a while.”
MetroFi has lost a number of contracts over the last year as it shifted its model—a process they say began in late 2006—from public access funded through advertising to public access/public safety, with anchor tenancy required by a city. In some cases, cities claimed that MetroFi brought up the requirement after contracts were signed; in others, municipalities said that the discussion started during negotiations.
In Portland, Ore., MetroFi apparently told the city in October that the company either needed a city commitment or additional capital to continue building the network. Nothing’s been said since, and Portland pretty vehemently said that they wouldn’t commit to any anchor tenant requirements.
While the city had originally budgeted $5m for a Wi-Fi network and “other technology upgrades,” the Beacon News reports, MetroFi came in with a no-cost proposal for the city. The newspaper says that the city will put out an RFI rather than sign a deal without bidding it out. Aurora and adjacent Naperville, which is in the same boat reports the Naperville Sun, will likely produce a joint proposal.
The Naperville Sun article has the interesting additional fact that MetroFi built pilot 4.9 GHz public safety networks for the two cities to examine, and after tests, “both cities chose not to purchase additional services.”
Related to this, perhaps, is that little word has come from MetroFi’s primary equipment supplier SkyPilot, since a report surfaced in Unstrung last summer of significant layoffs; the company didn’t confirm or deny those reports at the time or since. MetroFi is the only metro-scale Wi-Fi firm in the U.S. to use SkyPilot’s gear.
Posted by Glennf at 7:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Another Kite Networks operation confirmed down: The Dallas Morning News reports on the problems in Farmers Branch, Tex., which has had a Kite Networks Wi-Fi system up since Nov. 2006 that never met the required spec for coverage. The network is dead, Gobility (Kite’s current owner) isn’t responding for comment, and the city is about to seize the equipment under a default agreement. Farmers Branch doesn’t want to operate the network, but with nearly 300 nodes in hand, they may be able to find a provider willing to go in with relatively little capital.
The only fly in the ointment is that Kite used Strix equipment, which is in use by no other major city-wide U.S. Wi-Fi vendor; it’s had good international adoption, and used in a public access/public safety deployment in Brookline, Mass. This may make it hard for an existing network operator to want to take over equipment they’re not used to using. Update: I was informed by Strix and another unrelated party that Farmers Branch is full of Cisco gear, not Strix equipment.
This is the first article to state what I’ve been told privately: that Gobility essentially started shutting down weeks, beginning with firing all its employees, according to former marketing VP Alan Crancer, who is quoted in this article.
Posted by Glennf at 2:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Local paper reports Telscape may scotch plan to buy Kite Networks’ Tempe, Chandler networks: The abrupt shutdown by Gobility of their network services—but not the hardware—in Tempe and Chandler, Ariz., is leading Telscape to reconsider its purchase of those networks, six months in the making. Telscape has been trying to take over network operations even though the deal isn’t done, the local East Valley Tribune reports.
Yuma, Ariz., recognizes their network won’t be built: Kite had committed some time ago to building a network in Yuma with a local partner. (This article incorrectly says Telscape has purchased Kite, when the arrangement isn’t complete, and Telscape is buying just the Arizona network.)
In Longmont, Colo., another Kite network goes free for the moment as its future is decided: Longmont’s network has been set to “free” while Gobility seeks a buyer, according to the Longmont Times-Call.
Posted by Glennf at 7:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Arizona Republic reports Tempe, Chandler network disruption in Arizona temporary: The networks in those two adjacent city, operated by Kite Networks, went down due to what the city of Tempe’s go-to man on Wi-Fi, Dave Heck, said was Gobility and Kite shutting down their authentication servers before potential buyer Telscape had assumed operational control. This is why the several Tempe network users who wrote me were generally able to see an active network but not connect. The article says that Telscape should have the network back up this evening or tomorrow, while Chandler’s network has been available since Friday. See my coverage from yesterday, with a recap on Kite’s history and the state of municipal Wi-Fi.
Update: Heck is even blunter in this interview with another local paper, the East Valley Tribune: “Kite could have kept its servers running while California-based Telscape was preparing to take over service, Heck said, but instead decided to just shut down. ‘I don’t think they even cared, to be honest with you,’ Heck said.”
While the deal is apparently not finalized with Telscape, a large regional telecommunications company with a specialty focus on Spanish-speaking customers, it’s far enough underway that they’re assuming network responsibilities. With only several hundred current subscribers to the two networks, the lockout had limited effect.
Posted by Glennf at 2:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Meraki Networks raises $20m in additional funds, spends a small portion on providing free Wi-Fi across San Francisco: Meraki, founded by MIT students, funded by Google, Sequoia Capital, and others, will expand its current 2 sq mi mesh Wi-Fi network in San Francisco across the whole city. Meraki will foot the backhaul bill and pay for equipment—but it won’t pay for real estate. The city will help publicize the network, but I haven’t read anything concrete about the city’s plans. (Read good local coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
The clever bit here, and how Meraki may succeed where EarthLink failed, is that the firm is relying on individuals and businesses to choose to opt in, site equipment, and take advantage of the network working better for everyone because they participate (paging Ayn Rand). Meraki plans to offer solar-powered outdoor nodes for extending the network’s reach, which means potential locations don’t have to provide electricity on rooftops or elsewhere, which in turn means fewer or no layers of approval from anyone in authority (whether a neighborhood association, landlord, or the city). “It’s relatively easy to install on private rooftops,” said Meraki CEO and co-founder Sanjit Biswas in a briefing earlier today.
In the process, Meraki gets a city-wide testbed for local search, local ads, and new technology. “The great thing about having a real-world testbed is you can see the performance,” Biswas said. Meraki is testing advertising now, but Biswas says it’s “very much in the test mode.”
While Biswas didn’t disclose any of the costs of building the city-wide San Francisco network or its recurring bandwidth bill for backhaul—he told the AP “a few million”—the math works for Meraki. Giving away 10,000 to 15,000 nodes that cost them as little as $25 assembled for indoor nodes and a few hundred for outdoor nodes with solar chargers and batteries doesn’t add up to a lot. They don’t have to negotiate pole rates, handle installation, or pay recurring venue fees. Bandwidth is relatively cheap if you can choose the points at which you inject it, which Meraki will be able to do. Update: I misunderstood the backbone part. Meraki will, in fact, install some hundreds of solar-powered outdoor nodes to run the backhaul; but they’ll still be working with people to find those locations rather than securing those rooftops themselves.
Meraki has learned quite a lot about the real world, Biswas said, with their current San Francisco network, having identified 20,000 interferers—other devices within range and frequency of Meraki nodes—within the 2 sq mi area. Meraki nodes use a centralized intelligence to control routing, as well as a modification to Wi-Fi that doesn’t affect end users’ ability to connect, but does allow clusters of routers to act dynamically as a unit.
With unmodified mesh Wi-Fi networks, all devices within range of one another and on the same channel act in concert, reducing flexibility and throughput; smaller clusters produce better results. Further, most of the metro-scale Wi-Fi devices sold by Tropos and others are designed to put out the highest possible power output; Meraki uses generally low-power equipment. It’s ants versus elephants, with ants being able to change course a bit more quickly. “It’s kind of a brains over brawns approach. It’s really because we have so many radios,” said Biswas, that their network is more flexible. “We can set routes and load balance appropriately to get the maximum performance out of the network,” Biswas said.
The current San Francisco network has seen 40,000 unique devices so far—there’s no registration, so each unique adapter number is counted—and moved over 10 terabytes of data. Of those 40,000 devices, 1,000 were iPhones.
Biswas said that Meraki has discovered its biggest market may be developing countries where there’s an established user base for the Internet that’s limited to dial up or slow-speed broadband, and where carriers could deploy Meraki gear to get around non-existent copper infrastructure.
“A lot of our largest customers are carriers that are entering markets in Brazil and India,” he said. “We’re not at this point going after the most remote villages in the world; there are some very dense populations who…would love to use broadband but just can’t get it.”
Posted by Glennf at 9:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Minneapolis continues to shine through as perhaps the only big city Wi-Fi project that hasn’t gone off the rails: The independent firm operating the network, US Internet, tells the Star Tribune that it’s on track to what should be characterized as positive cash flow based on their description by spring. They have 5,000 customers now for their network which covers 30 percent of the city. But more impressively, 7,000 people have registered for the service when it becomes available. Their magic number for cash flow is 10,000 subscribers.
These goals are in line with signups seen elsewhere in smaller networks that often get worse reviews. The current 5,000 subscribers would represent less than 5 percent of the population (roughly) in the area covered. With 100 percent city coverage, 10,000 subscribers is just 2.6 percent of the nearly 400,000 population (2000 census). The network is now expected to be built out to its full extent by around February. (Update: To clarify, based on a comment emailed to me, that’s 5,000 subscribers in 30 percent of the city, thus nearly 5 percent of that subset of population currently covered, not 5 percent of the 400,000 people.)
That’s a far cry from the 15 to 35 percent uptake that some providers were predicting or requiring, although that was often in cities with much less broadband connectivity than Minneapolis’s incumbents offer its residents. If US Internet can really hit a sustainable—not profitable, but sustainable—point with that few subscribers, they should be in a good position moving forward. The company also has city contracts, which is nearly unique in the metro-scale market, despite the current focus on obtaining “anchor tenancy” for new networks.
Reports indicate that after some tweaking a few months ago, the service performs quite well. Novarum has tested the network and hasn’t released details yet, but says its impressions are favorable.
So what did US Internet do in Minneapolis that EarthLink and others failed to do elsewhere? Apparently, they planned the network with greater density, so that even while costs went up, they didn’t double or triple. They secured a contract for services from the city. They obtained an advanced payment against services from the city. They responded quickly in an emergency—the bridge collapsed—earning enormous goodwill, while showing the flexibility of their system.
The only other comparable project is Portland, Ore., in terms of scale; that network reportedly has much more usage than any other metro network, mostly because it’s an ad-supported, free service. However, the operator MetroFi and the City of Portland revealed weeks ago that the company wouldn’t extend the network without an anchor tenancy commitment (Portland says no) or raising additional capital. MetroFi hasn’t discussed revenue relative to expense or cash flow.
Posted by Glennf at 6:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., finds itself with a network that’s incomplete and doesn’t meet basic contract requirements, the Star Tribune reports: The for-fee network, being built by ARINC but owned by the city, hasn’t fulfilled even the first level of service quality required before additional testing is performed in any of the four quadrants of the network, according to St. Louis Park. The network was supposed to be in full operation by summer, and now after lengthy delays, there’s no longer any expected completion date. The firm was the low bidder in part because of its unique reliance on solar power to drive the nodes; that’s apparently not the root of the problems.
The 45,000 person city has 20,000 households, and has 4,000 people reregistered for service, which likely means about one person per household. This is an incredibly high potential penetration rate, although the city’s numbers at the time of the bid award were that they were looking for about 6,100 households (32 percent) to sign up within 12 months.
The city claims $300,000 in revenue loss so far due to the delays. Early in the year, residents balked at the first design for the 16-foot poles that would be mounted in hundreds of places around the city, and that led to a two-month hiatus while the infrastructure was redesigned.
Posted by Glennf at 1:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hey, we finally got numbers about Tempe, Ariz., in an article about the network operator’s assets being purchased: I’m not sure what Telscape (incorrectly noted as Telescape in the article) Communications is thinking about. The coverage of the current network after three years of work is apparently inadequate, despite what is now called Kite Networks’ increasing from 400 to 1,200 nodes to cover the city’s 40 sq mi. (They don’t say 1,200, but they said 400 nodes originally at launch, 600 later after coverage was too poor, and “three times” the original count in this article.)
Telscape is a bilingual telephone company and has operations in parts of the country with large Hispanic audiences. Thus, Tempe isn’t a bad place for them to concentrate on. The firm’s chairman told Tempe’s city council he was considering a buyout of the network because he thought he could market the network much more effectively, obtaining 10,000 customers, which would be 6 percent of Tempe’s population. Seems unlikely. Wi-Fi market penetration hasn’t exceeded low single digits yet in any city offering it unless the service is free; and free doesn’t stop people complaining about it. In Tempe, particularly, the university population is concentrated, but fleeting and cheap (students don’t have an extra $10 or $20 per month), while served in part by Internet access in dorms and on campus. (The university, last time I checked, has no campus-wide Wi-Fi.)
The company is researching the deal, but the chair thought the network was well built technologically. We’ll see what due diligence brings. Meanwhile, recall that Kite Networks was bought by Gobility in a deal that required additional funds to be raised that weren’t. So I’m not sure in the end (there weren’t any filings recently by Kite’s former parent company) whether Gobility will be selling the assets or returning them to NeoReach for them to be sold.
I wrote about Tempe back in March 2006 for a feature in The Economist in which I discussed all the things that would be problematic for Wi-Fi networks and that weren’t being addressed. I noted that Tempe already had a wireless network used for backhaul that had dropped their telecom costs from $1.7m to $0.5m a year (exclusive of capital). Tempe was supposed to be an ideal case, given its compact audience and rather flat terrain, as well as the large university population.
In a bit of understatement, here’s my conclusion from the Economist article: “The real measure of municipal wireless networks will not be in places such as Tempe, where they are expected to work, but in bigger cities, where success is far from certain. Whether service providers will be able to meet the required technical standards and still make a profit will soon become clear.”
Washington’s capital, Olympia, opts out of Wi-Fi: They decided the small sum they’d allotted was too small to produce any interesting results. They had budgeted $20,000 for some amount of Wi-Fi, and learned it would cost $100,000s to build what they’d envisioned.
Philomath will get Wi-Fi, perhaps for free: A local provider might get a contract from the city which would enable it to build a network that could perhaps be offered at no cost. The same firm built a free, small hotzone in Corvallis, where the state’s agricultural and engineering college, Oregon State University, is based, and they may be able to expand that network. The small Oregon city is pronounced fill-OH-muth, not, as you probably just said to yourself, FILL-a-math. (I spent formative years in Oregon.)
Posted by Glennf at 9:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
E-Path Communications gets Trenton, NJ, contract as sole bidder for city Wi-Fi network: E-Path, as you’ll recall is also on the hook to build out (with help from two larger partners) two counties in Long Island, Nassau and Suffolk. The relatively young firm has now also agreed to build both city-only and public-access networks for Trenton, NJ, entirely at the company’s expense. The company is quoted as saying they’ll sell services to the city to recoup their investment; in other municipalities, cities are fronting some or much of the cost of public-safety oriented networks given that municipalities are the only legal customers of such networks.
E-Path is the last of an otherwise dead breed of Wi-Fi firms willing to front bills, wait for fees to come in, and talk about sub-40-node-per-sq-mi networks (they say 30 to 40 in this article).
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EarthLink drops another bombshell: They hired Rolla Huff to sort out their future business, and his message from the start was steely eye, bottom line, get things on track for the future in an industry in turmoil. Then Huff cuts a huge percentage of the staff, lays off the municipal network head, and says no more investment in new networks without a change in model. Now the final piece is in place: No more “significant investments” for existing networks without some alternative model being in place, which isn’t specified in the press release.
Many wondered if this were coming when the layoffs were announced. EarthLink was reassuring that it would continue to work on and finish projects it was committed to. But now, not so much. Philadelphia at last check was 65 percent complete. Update: The Associated Press has more detail (some of it added late in the day in an updated filing), including a statement from Philadelphia’s current CIO who says EarthLink will complete the network—EarthLink also confirmed this—but has no commitment now to operate it. “Philadelphia could take the network over and find another company to operate it,” the AP writes, which was precisely the worst-case scenario for public ownership that its detractors originally stated. (Although in this form, the city will be getting the infrastructure at perhaps zero cost.)
Other cities like Anaheim, New Orleans, and Corpus Christi were in various stages of completion or upgrade. The release values the muni business at $40m. That’s useful to know when they shut it down entirely and write off the value. I expect there may be a company or two willing to buy the networks on the cheap if the engineering conforms to the buyers’ expectations.
Further update: Greg Richardson of the consulting firm Civitium helped Philadelphia draft their agreement with EarthLink. He notes on his blog that EarthLink can’t just walk away, but that the city can release EarthLink under circumstances it chooses, or EarthLink can sell the networks in a specific way that would get them off the hook for certain provisions (not all).
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Long Island is seeing a bit of competition already over Wi-Fi: The ambitious and almost certain-to-fail plan set by the counties of Suffolk and Nassau to have a private firm blanket the two municipalities with Wi-Fi has a very early phase ready to go in December, which is impressive. The first pilot covers 2.5 miles of Route 110, and will be free. The network will be up for 45 to 60 days. Among other purposes, I would imagine that the network will be designed to sniff how many Wi-Fi devices are querying it, as well as to see how well they can provide service.
Meanwhile, Cablevision has quietly started to build out Wi-Fi hotspots and hotzones for its subscribers in useful locations all over its coverage area, including Long Island. Notably, they’re offering service at Bridgeport and Port Jefferson’s ferry docks. Very smart. Very interesting.
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Interesting news from the Big Apple, with CBS working with the MTA on a 20-city-block hotzone: The free, ad-supported Wi-Fi network includes a variety of news content. It covers Times Square to Central Park South between 6th and 8th avenues. The Wi-Fi nodes are placed on CBS Outdoor billboards and on Metropolitan Transit Authority “urban panels,” which I assume are some kind of advertising vehicle, located above subway station entrances. CBS will also distribute routers to extend the network to provide better indoor coverage, which is unique in my experience for hotzone networks.
The press release is full of bluster and hype, with a CBS Mobile exec calling this “what may be the most advanced wireless and pre-WiMax outdoor offering of it’s [sic] kind in the U.S.” Now, I don’t know that this is the most advanced offering, and it’s certainly not pre-WiMax. But it’s definitely an interesting project, and one that could benefit commuters and businesspeople in a dense part of the city where people are likely to have handheld Wi-Fi devices.
The release also talks about hyperlocal content, but then lists “local and national news, sports highlights,” and other items that have nothing to do with the 20-block area in question. There is a feature to find nearby commerce: restaurants, shops, and entertainment.
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