Receive new posts as email.
RSS 0.91 | RSS 2.0
RDF | Atom
Podcast only feed (RSS 2.0 format)
Get an RSS reader
Get a Podcast receiver
| Sun | Mon | Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
This site operates as an independent editorial operation. Advertising, sponsorships, and other non-editorial materials represent the opinions and messages of their respective origins, and not of the site operator or JiWire, Inc.
Entire site and all contents except otherwise noted © Copyright 2001-2006 by Glenn Fleishman. Some images ©2006 Jupiterimages Corporation. All rights reserved. Please contact us for reprint rights. Linking is, of course, free and encouraged.
Powered by
Movable Type
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)
The Ricochet network had continued to operate in Denver, passing through multiple hands, until its death March 28: I feel like playing taps. The Ricochet network, started up by Metricom, which spent billions and sold some assets for pennies on the dollar, was closed by Civitas, a company formed by the president of then-owner Terabeam’s Ricochet division. The Ricochet site notes service halted on March 28.
The company claimed 6,000 users as of last August, but it seemed like a hard row to hoe competing as it was essentially against 2G/2.5G cellular data service that can be had for a pittance through embedded devices and cards. I tried to reach the company, and while its phones still work, the Civitas voice tree hangs up when you try to reach a real person, and Ricochet’s tells you the network is shut down, and directs you to their Web site.
When I wrote about the sale in August 2007, I noted that Civitas was claiming “a decade of experience operating large-scale wireless deployments,” which was specious. I noted, “That’s only true if you count some of the equipment mounted in Denver as continuous employees of the company.”
Goodbye, Ricochet, an idea first way ahead of its time, and then way, way behind it.
Posted by Glennf at 1:05 PM | Comments (3)
Two from the ecological files today: In Costa Rica, a UCLA group is using Wi-Fi and fiber optic to provide canopy-level monitoring of microclimates that are typically hard to track. The top of the rain-forest canopy—in the La Selva Biological Station in this case—has a very different set of conditions than at the base. One measurement particularly of interest is the rate of CO2 leakage from the rain forest to see how the gas is passed in different areas, especially where there gaps due to tree falls.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., solar-gear maker Xantrex has added a Wi-Fi-based gateway to relay information about solar-panel performance in home installations. An embedded Web server provides information, or it can be retrieved and logged on a networked PC. It seems like the power draw from this device shouldn’t be very high, but it’s not noted.
Posted by Glennf at 1:55 PM | Comments (0)
ThinkGeek to release Wi-Fi detection shirt: I had to check today’s date, despite the autumnal crispness in the air, because this is the kind of thing that ThinkGeek routinely offers up on April 1. But it appears to be real. It’s a Wi-Fi detector with battery-pack that displays via a decal on a T-shirt front. It’s $30, comes in S to XXL, and detects 802.11b and 802.11g. Requires three AAA batteries (not included). The washing instructions are particularly amusing; I have had silk shirts that required less care. The shirt ships later this month. And, no, I’m not looking for a gift. [via Gizmodo]
Posted by Glennf at 7:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Wireless power coming closer to reality (abstract of paper, Wall Street Journal story): Researchers at MIT demonstrate lighting a 60-watt bulb (dimly) from over two meters. True, 40 percent power loss, but that’s over open space. Commercial products might be a few years away. The short story is that they use a pair of copper coils tuned to the same magnetic resonance so that power is targeted in one place. The technology will work only over short distances, but that might make it possible to charge battery-powered devices by having them just in rough proximity to resonance chargers, or to have battery-free, wireless devices that work only in the vicinity.
Posted by Glennf at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
For those who want no electromagnetic radiation in their homes, perhaps this new window film would help: CPFilms Llumar Signal Defense—the latest in EMF-blocking paints and covers—is designed to pass light but not signals. The idea is that by putting this film over windows, companies can keep their networks more fully enclosed. (Walls might need special paint, or might have enough material already blocking transmission.) The company says it’s been making the film for several years for government purposes, protecting over 200 federal agency buildings. The film is also blast-resistent, and reduces fragmentation in case of an explosion or break-in.
Ostensibly, someone attempting to prevent signals from entering their homes, could apply this to their windows, too, serving the opposite intent.
Posted by Glennf at 2:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What has six antennas, 4 GB of Compact Flash, and costs €999? I don’t know, but it’s crawling up your network. The rather crazy people at Geek Technique have built a strange box capable of attaching to six separate Wi-Fi networks and aggregating the results into a single stream of broadband. Of course, to actually bond two or more networks, you need to have support on the server side and the receiving side, so it’s more likely that this box round-robins requests (image request one to that network, Web page request two to that network) than anything fancier. Still! And remember: more and more people are being arrested for using free or unprotected networks. This might get you arrested six times in one day.
Posted by Glennf at 9:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Steve Jobs directly confirmed to one questioner that Apple would charge for its 802.11n enabler for existing Macintoshes: A reader who prefers to remain anonymous forwarded me the mail he sent to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, and the reply he received. He included mail headers so that I can confirm the mail is legitimate. The reader asked Jobs whether press reports were in error that Apple would charge $5 for an “enabler” that would turn on the 802.11n functions in most Core 2 Duo and Xeon systems shipped in 2006. (The 17-inch 1.83 GHz iMac with Core 2 Duo lacks the necessary chip.)
Jobs replied, simply, “It’s the law,” which would confirm that the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement that seemed bizarre to me is, in fact, correct. In several reports, the law is cited as requiring different accounting for earnings on products that are shipped and later provide new functionality that wasn’t initially advertised. Charging for the updater means that the functionality didn’t come for free. I still hope to hear some better analysis about why the law requires this kind of product update micromanagement.
In any case, the email is legitimate, and Jobs’s reply is unambiguous.
My earlier post on this was titled, “Apple Won’t Charge $5 for 802.11n,” but what I said—not so clearly—was that Apple would only tacitly charge that if they charged anything. The company isn’t discussing releasing a locked, serialized enabler that works only with laptops and desktops that have been approved for update. Rather, they may charge $5 for an enabler, but the enabler will quickly be distributed for free, however informally, until the millions of older machines are patched.
I suspect based on Jobs’s response, too, that Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which will be a paid operating system update shipping in second quarter 2007, could include the enabler, too, since that’s a separate fee. The AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n will include the enabler, and I’m extending the logic from there.
Posted by Glennf at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wired reports on the gas pump with extra octane—I mean, octal: The Ovation iX has a touchscreen, speakers, and Wi-Fi built in. It shows commercials, but can also transfer music files to equipment in a car that’s appropriately configured. Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit was involved in the development. Of course, I totally want to be waiting for gas while somebody fiddles with settings to buy music from a pump. Pump rage could be 2008’s road rage.
Posted by Glennf at 2:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wired News published this interesting round up of beaches with Wi-Fi: Florida’s Haulover Beach is perhaps the only clothing-optional beach that features Internet access. Sans clothes, sans wires: It’s a theme.
Posted by Glennf at 9:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The head of EarthLink had taken a leave of absence just a few weeks ago for treatment of a “serious form of cancer”: Garry Betty had run EarthLink since 1996, when he took over several roles from founder Sky Dayton, who remained chairman. Betty kept EarthLink a vital ISP, growing subscribers from 500,000 to 5m over his tenure, while other firms collapsed under the weight of competition first from AOL and MSN and then from incumbent telecom and cable firms.
EarthLink has also been the largest player in city-wide Wi-Fi, a move Betty directed as the company’s traditional dial-up customer base shrunk, and court and regulatory decisions made wireline resale of DSL and cable access ever more difficult.
My condolences to Betty’s family, friends, and his colleagues at EarthLink.
Posted by Glennf at 8:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., considers solar-powered Wi-Fi network: The service would be deployed by ARINC in the current plan, using 400 solar panels paired with batteries and Wi-Fi nodes. A city official estimates savings of $40,000 to $50,000 per year in electricity. Not noted is a comparison of upfront costs for solar deployment versus what are often highly variable costs in wiring nodes into utility pole power supplies. The power at poles and other locations can be of varying voltage, only in operation certain hours of the day, or taxed to the limit, requiring substantial rework to obtain additional juice.
The Wi-Fi service is currently being tested by 300 residents in the 10-square-mile town of about 45,000 and 20,000 households. The service would be fee-based, and the city will pay $3.3m upfront to have ARINC design, build, and operate the network, with the investment expected to span five years of upgrades and maintenance. It’s described as a public/private partnership, but with the city paying the costs, it’s unclear precisely where the ownership lies. Service would bafflingly range from $15 per month for 128 Kbps to $20 for 1 Mbps. That’s a strange range.
Posted by Glennf at 8:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
I love the smell of Bakelite in the morning: The fine people at ThinkGeek have taken their USB-corded retro handset and cut the cord. This Bluetooth handset has the charm of the old AT&T telephones, with the flexibility of Bluetooth. For $40, it’s an easy sell for the stylish and those that like that full-sized effect. (They continue to sell their USB-only version for $30; this Bluetooth version includes a USB connector for charging.) [link via Gizmodo]
Posted by Glennf at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Aruba thinks it may be part of the creation of the world’s largest wireless local area network (WLAN): I’m not quite sure if they’re right, but they make a good case. The network will require between 3,000 and 10,000 APs. On the short end of that range, there are plenty of campus-wide (academic and business) networks in that scale. But on the higher end, I’m unaware of anything that large. Even city-wide networks like Philadelphia should employ only the mid-thousands of nodes, although they’re not providing the same kind of high-availabily, in-building overage that Ohio State will have.
The stats: 50,000 students, 27,000 faculty/staff, 25 million square feet across 400 buildings, and 1,700 acres. In three weeks, they’ve lit up 1,700 APs in 28 buildings. I assumed that was the time to get the network running, not both physically stringing APs and logically activating the network—but I’m apparently wrong. Read the comment below. [link via Engadget]
Posted by Glennf at 11:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Nokia introduces Wibree, a low-power alternative to Bluetooth: No, no, no, no. We don’t need another wireless standard with a silly name. Wibree supposedly uses one-tenth the power of Bluetooth to deliver 1 Mbps (1/3 of Bluetooth’s current radio speed) over 10 meters. With Zigbee (extremely low bandwidth, extremely low power, short distances), ultrawideband (high bandwidth, low power, short distances), Bluetooth (low-to-medium bandwidth, low power, short distances), and Wi-Fi (medium bandwidth, medium power, medium distances), it’s really hard to see how Wibree fits into this ecosystem.
Bluetooth has a billion embedded chips now, and is still growing, despite reports of its death every few weeks since before its actual first shipment. Bluetooth is morphing from an application plus radio standard into an application standard that can be overlaid with minimal effort onto many radio standards. In that sense, perhaps Bluetooth would be a layer over Wibree, which would be just radio technology.
Still, Nokia should have a hard time of it introducing yet-another-technology that appears to have a single unique attribute—lower power than Bluetooth. They will try to get it introduced into a standards process.
Posted by Glennf at 12:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Chumby received a rush of blog-licity when the firm handed out these portable Wi-Fi thingamabobs at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp to alpha-geeks: The device, in prototype, is small, designed for the “kids,” and sports a Wi-Fi adapter, an AC power plug, a small, color touchscreen, and an open architecture. The company wants people to hack the software, hardware, and even the device’s case with their own modifications. It’s not precisely open source, but it’s all open. They hope the device will ship in the second quarter of 2007 for about $150. They also expect that it could be licensed or replicated in many forms—they have released or shortly will release the parts list and schematics among other parameters—and they’re curious what results.
In this podcast interview with Avalon Ventures partner and Chumby Industries chairman Steve Tomlin, we talk about how having a device that’s designed to be open affects what gets developed for it. We also talk about how Chumby, as a general-purpose appliance, make available many kinds of applications—it’s not just another picture frame, just another music player, or just another RSS display. In its current iteration, the Chumby has a touchscreen but no keyboard interface. Tomlin expects someone is already working on that. [27 min., 12 MB, MP3]
Posted by Glennf at 3:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
One of the oldest wireless ISPs I’m aware of gets upstart in its backyard: Midcoast Internet Solutions started offering wireless broadband in 1997 using equipment from a firm later acquired by Alvarion. They’re based in Rockland, although they started up in a neat little town nearby, picturesquely named Owl’s Head, where the local airport is. (Of course, every town in Maine is named something picturesque. I lived in Camden, a few miles north of Rockland, for about two years in the early 1990s working for a distant and wacky teaching arm of Kodak.)
Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe has a place up the way a few dozen miles, and offered the firm’s founder some good advice more than 10 years ago. (I wrote about Midcoast back in 2001; Metcalfe, who had or perhaps still has a sheep farm, wrote about them the same year when he was an InfoWorld columnist.)
About three blocks from their HQ, you’ll now find RedZone, which started offering wireless broadband this last spring, and made a formal announcement about its service. The two firms are competing across a quite similar geographic area and offering quite similar pricing and services. Midcoast appears to still be using Alvarion gear. RedZone opted for SkyPilot equipment. Rockland’s county, Knox, has about 40,000 residents.
Is the market mature enough to allow for competition at this scale among a set of small towns? It’s part of the market that Clearwire will be after, too, with many of their licenses in less-urban areas of the U.S.
Back in 2001, Midcoast charged $800 for installation, and rebated $300 for a one-year commitment. Now, they charge $100 total with a one-year commitment. 1 Mbps service, apparently symmetrical, runs $50 per month; 2 Mbps is $90 per month.
RedZone provisions lower speeds, offering 500 Kbps/128 Kbps for a $50 setup fee and $20 per month with no contract commitment. The equipment is owned by RedZone and must be returned when service is canceled. They charge $100 setup and $35 per month for 1.5 Mbps/768 Kbps, and $100 setup and $50 per month for 2.5 Mbps/1.5 Mbps.
When I last visited Camden, cable modem service was spotty and DSL was barely available. Dial-up and leased line services would be the only real alternatives to wireless broadband. A few years ago, Midcoast had to bring in their T-1 lines in that standard’s original, ugly form: a huge bundle of copper wires patched into their T-1 CSU/DSU. I know there were plans to bring fiber through and other, modern services, but I don’t know at the moment whether late 20th century and early 21st century technology is running on 19th century copper.
(Lobster courtesy of Beal’s on Mount Desert Island. My wife ate the one pictured.)
Posted by Glennf at 3:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Bad bad bunny: I am exercises my arbitrary editorial discretion to state that I will not write about this rabbit, which costs $150, glows, and wiggles its ears based on…as I said, I will not write about this bunny. They’ve sold 50,000 of them in Europe, and it’s now available in the U.S. Okay, that’s it. You can buy it from ThinkGeek. Really, I’m done.
Posted by Glennf at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Green Wi-Fi wants to use solar power as a hook to push networks into developing nations: The nonprofit wants to develop units that will combine solar for charging with a battery for off-peak hours. Seed money has come from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which I keep thinking puts technology before applications. The challenge is not just that billions of people live without any or reliable electricity in their areas, but also that weather conditions could produce long periods of weak sunlight.
The less power that’s trickling in, the more that the system intelligently cuts off users, uses, and periods of use to leave a window of availability. The first test was 28 days of straight rain in San Francisco without a hitch in continuous operations. Their first test will be in India through a Canadian aid organization’s interest.
Podcast questions: I’ll be talking to Green Wi-Fi in a podcast interview next week. Do you have questions for them? Send them on in.
Posted by Glennf at 3:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Vivato’s Web site has been reanimated from the dead: There’s no information on why. I wrote extensively about Vivato’s big, cool, fundamentally unworkable products over their several years of life. Here’s the obituary. Premature? There was word the company was bought by GeoWireless, a firm that was using Vivato panels in their installations. (Yes, it’s an all-Flash site.)
Posted by Glennf at 4:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
When you’re swimming in the ocean, even the lowliest tissue becomes a water detector: Lo, a few years ago, when we were lonely islands of Wi-Fi connectivity in an uncaring void of wired broadband, cruelly locked away within homes and businesses, a Wi-Fi detector acted like a beacon, a lighthouse if you will, giving us some hope for a seamless tomorrow. Early Wi-Fi detectors lit up in some fashion, often using multiple lights to indicate a range of signal strength, when Wi-Fi was near. Later detectors added directionality, and then LCDs to show network names.
Now, drowning in the Wi-Fi surf, as it chops about our head and shoulders, the undertow sucking us deep, deep, deep linked down, full fathom 101—that’s binary, folks—thy father lies, of his cables are coral made, those are radios that were his eyes, and so on, a Wi-Fi detector doesn’t tell us more about the deeps. A solid, unblinking light, like the all-seeing eye of Sauron (cf., Lord of the Rings) just lets us know we’re within the scope of Wi-Fi, not whether it’s open, free, available, or, as is more likely, shut to the likes of us.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but you can’t use a sword to determine whether a Wi-Fi network is around. Unless you threaten the nearest geek with it, I suppose. For $18.95, a nice, limited edition paperweight which, in most areas, confirms what we already know. Such as, my window is a rain detector—I open it up, lean out, and if I get wet, it’s raining. [link via BoingBoing]
Posted by Glennf at 7:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Sacramento to San Jose run has four vendors willing to try to stick high-speed wireless service on moving trains: The transportation authority that runs the 171-mile-long train line put out a request for information (RFI) in March, looking for companies that would have interest in trying lots of different ideas in this trial phase. Those who answered the RFI wouldn’t be restricted from answering a later request for proposals (RFP), and the process developed for this train line could be the model for dozens of transportation systems in California and, likely, beyond.
The four selected companies out of 11 proposals are a interesting bunch: Concourse Communications, known for dual cell/Wi-Fi installation in airports and recently purchased by Boingo Wireless; EarthLink, about whom we all know plenty; Nomad Digital, which operates a WiMax-based service on a Brighton to London line in England; and ATCI, about whom I know nothing, which is the head of a consortium that will look into bidirectional satellite access.
A host of applications are intended for the network, and these companies will test various of them, including basics like email, Web browsing, and corporate VPN access, and more advanced or bandwidth-intensive functions like video streaming, video surveillance, and train diagnostic transmission. The tests will last until December, with a competitive RFP slated for spring 2007. No company excluded from the RFI process is excluded from bidding on the project in its RFP stage.
Update: ATCI wrote in to note that they typically build large projects that tie security in with technology, such as video surveillance and asset tracking. The company with partner Wi-Fi America is currently installing a wireless-based video surveillance system on a 72-mile commuter rail run in South Florida. The consortium they’re part of for this California proposal includes Train-Phoenix of Madrid, which has tested 200 mph wireless communications successfully, and Pronto Networks, which provides back-end billing and authentication systems for hotspots and municipal networks.
In related news…Virgin Train announced that they would work with QinetiQ Rail to put Internet access on trains through a combination of HSDPA cell data, WiMax, Wi-Fi, and satellite access. The west coast of England line covers 1,500 km, and QinetiQ claims they’ll hit 49 Mbps downstream for trains traveling within reach of WiMax (about 10 percent of the line) and 20 Mbps for the rest via satellite. The service will run at speeds up to 200 km/h.
Posted by Glennf at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A neat experiment in community will be repeated in San Jose in August: A year ago, Anab Jain handed people flyers with tear-off contact information that read “Wanted” and asked them to fill out what they wanted. Neighbors and a Wi-Fi connection were two responses. Jain took this idea and created the yellow chair: A chair they placed outside Jain’s house with access to her Internet-connected Wi-Fi network. They did a little advertising for it, and created a book. She made a neat movie about it, too.
we-make-money-not-art reports that two designer/artists will install their yellow chairs in San Jose, if they can find welcoming households. The we-make-money-not-art site includes a short interview, and notes that Jain and a collaborator won a prize in the UNESCO Digital Art Awards competition.
[link via Doc Searls, worldchanging]
Posted by Glennf at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Space Data, a losing bidder on commercial air-to-ground spectrum, has lofty goals: The company didn’t win the 1 MHz license in the 800 MHz spectrum auction—JetBlue’s LiveTV division snagged it for over $7m—but they are moving ahead with their fill-in cell tower offering. They loft lightweight cell transmitters to 20 miles using inexpensive balloons. The transmitters, which carry juice for 8 to 10 hours of operation, can function to as much as 420 miles in diameter. (Their site says 420 miles in diameter; the article says, imprecisely, 50 to 500 miles.)
The trick is that the transmitters are designed to parachute to safety and be recoverable through embedded GPS locators and transceivers, but new transmitters must be launched constantly. This could add up to $100,000 to $300,000 per cell site per year, but this could be substantially cheaper than any comparable terrestrial option for remote areas or areas with zoning issues. The technology is currenty used by oil companies in some southern and southwestern states to track vehicles and monitor production.
No word on how transmitters that land on private property are recovered.
In the air-to-ground 800 MHz spectrum auction, Space Data won a ruling that allowed them to use their balloons to communicate with aircraft, which might have obviated a chunk of the ground stations they would otherwise have had to build, but they lost permission for secondary licensing of the spectrum, which would have allowed unrelated terrestrial-only use. (If that had been permitted, the auctions would have been much more valuable. In an interview today, AirFone founder Jack Goeken said that GTE bought AirFone way back when because it wanted the secondary use of the spectrum that AirFone had for ground mobile devices.)
Space Data has competitors, which include Sanswire Networks, which proposes unmanned 13-mile up solar-powered blimps that will stay fixed in place, and carry transmitters for cellular networks and Internet access. Straight up offers excellent line of sight.
Posted by Glennf at 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
M2Z has hundreds of millions of dollars poised to start building a national backbone: All they need is sweet, sweet spectrum. This new firm burst into broadband consciousness just two weeks ago when it filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asking for 20 MHz of spectrum with a 15-year license at no cost (2155-2175 MHz).
M2Z promises to use this spectrum provide free, advertising-supported 384 Kpbs/128 Kpbs Internet service to 95 percent of the U.S. population alongside premium offerings of about 3 Mbps. They promise to deploy immediately and guarantee to meet deployment targets over a 10 year period, starting with 33 percent coverage within three years of the license grant.
What they offer in return is five percent of gross receipts for their premium service, which will run about 3 Mpbs.
I spoke to co-founder John Muleta, a former FCC bureau chief and executive at PSINet, and Michael Howse, co-founder and chief executive of PacketHop, a strategic partner for public safety with M2Z, about the need for M2Z in an era of increasing wireless options, the content filtering on their free service, and the technology that will drive their efforts.
Muleta said the motivation for this network was the lack of reach for Internet access. “The one universal truth is that there’s market failure to provide people with a universal, affordable access,” he said. While metro-scale networks using Wi-Fi are proliferating, Muleta said that what they’re proposing restores Wi-Fi back to a local area networking technology, its designed purpose, by providing backhaul using technology designed for wide area purposes. “We are neither opposed to nor critique municipal systems; we think they’ll be part of the mix,” Muleta said. Muleta thought M2Z could make it substantially less difficult and expensive to deploy metro-scale Wi-Fi, in fact.
Howse noted that by having backhaul available everywhere in a licensed band it will be easier for Wi-Fi networks to provide high-bandwidth local communications. PacketHop offers mesh equipment, and Howse envisions offloading to peer-to-peer networks a good portion of traffic that now, by necessity, passes through metro-scale Wi-Fi nodes. “You’re really decreasing the tax on some of the backhaul requirements by maintaining some of these local communications when they can be,” said Howse.
Both Howse and Muleta emphasize how edge applications will be able to flourish on the M2Z network as they will be a mostly neutral, non-discriminatory host. Our fundamental goal is to “make transport a non-issue so that edge applications can deliver,” Muleta said. They’ll encourage manfacturers to produce consumer premises equipment (CPE) devices that couple their wireless standard for backhaul with Wi-Fi for local distribution. Their interest isn’t limited to Wi-Fi, but that seems like the most logical first wave.
The M2Z approach is essentially a flavor of the 802.16-2005 standard (formerly 802.16e), which includes fixed, nomadic/portable, and mobile wireless connectivity. They’ll use the OFDMA standard that’s part of 802.16-2005 with beamforming through multiple antennas—what they call advanced antenna systems or AAS—and time division duplexing (TDD), which allows dynamic asymmetric network usage. With 20 MHz to play with, they could dedicate 1.25 MHz to the free service and still have three 5 MHz channels or one 5 MHz and one 10 MHz channel, based on current WiMax Forum generic profiles for service.
M2Z has received a fair amount of criticism over their promise to filter pornographic and related content over their free service. Muleta says this is a red herring. Muleta said that given that they will provide access to anyone eventually nearly anywhere in the U.S., they have significant liability concerns about allowing minors to have unfettered access, as this might put them afoul of state and federal laws—especially since they expect schools to take advantage of the free service. Muleta said their premium service will be unfiltered, unless requested, as they will have a billing relationship with premium customers that will allow age verification.
I tried to strike up a discussion of net neutrality, but Muleta, old FCC hand that he is, is focused more on the competitive aspects than the social and political ones; as a new provider, he wouldn’t want formal neutrality requirements. From Muleta and Howse’s descriptions, however, they don’t plan to limit what devices can use the network, will not require certification or approval of third-party devices (the more, the better, Muleta says), nor discriminate on the basis of services used. This is a fair amount of neutrality, although the devil is in the details if they decide port blocking is part of filtering or that swarming is inappropriate. (Several users with the right kind of peer-to-peer software could pull down pieces of large files at the full network download level and combine them over Wi-Fi, for instance.)
In other words, it might not be a “stupid” network, but they’re not making noises about how it might be smart, either. “Let lots of applications bloom,” Muleta said, and both he and Howse emphasized the critical importance of edge applications, which is a very “stupid network” view. Neither wanted to talk much about voice over IP, because, they said, they don’t want to limit the discussion to just that service.
One of Howse’s key messages for this bandwidth chunk is that it can be an additional, unencumbered, prioritized, and free method for ubiquitous access for public safety (fire, police, emergency, and first responders). PacketHop already sells into that market, and M2Z promises to allow unlimited public safety users. They envision this as potentially secondary to the 4.9 GHz public safety band, but the characteristics of M2Z’s network will be broader coverage.
The FCC has, in the past, allotted spectrum for particular purposes, but there’s no way to predict whether they’ll have any truck with this proposal; nor, if they agree with its terms, to know how many (if any) lawsuits will be filed by potential competitors in the cellular data and wireless broadband industries.
At this stage, everything is speculation. M2Z sees themselves as providing a vital service conforming to the goals of U.S. broadband initiatives, while filling a gap for small businesspeople who’s other alternative is typically a wired T-1 line. By the time M2Z could deploy, it’s possible that their impending entry into the market would have fundamentally transformed the nature of wireless services.
With Verizon Wireless sending out cancellation letters about non-typical bandwidth use in violation of their extremely restrictive policies of use—email, surfing, intranet apps—on their EVDO network, it’s very easy to see how 20 MHz could provide unencumbered, nonrestrictive bandwidth that would be a giant threat to cell providers, wireless ISPs, and wireline T-1.
Posted by Glennf at 4:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
M2Z networks pitches FCC on free 384/128 Kbps wireless broadband by offering five percent of its revenue: The Kleiner Perkins, Charles River, and Redpoint Ventures backed firm wants national spectrum in the 2155 to 2175 MHz advanced wireless services band. In exchange, the company would pay the U.S. Treasury five percent of its gross revenues from premium services that it would offer alongside its top free rate. The former FCC wireless bureau head John Muleta and @Home founder Milo Medin founded the firm, which claims access to $400m in capital.
The FCC normally sells spectrum at auction, but M2Z is pitching this as an alternative that has a public good attached. The 384 (down)/128 (up) Kbps speed would be advertising supported, so there would be revenue to pay that de facto franchise fee even for the “free” service. They would want a 15-year license.
Posted by Glennf at 1:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack