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The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) brings together 17 tech firms for 60 GHz streaming video, LAN standards: The 60 GHz unlicensed band, available for use in various forms worldwide, can carry Gbps of data, but there hasn't been unity about how to proceed. The new WiGig group will focus on streaming video (SiBeam is the leader in this band already), wireless LAN (the IEEE already has a 60 GHz working group underway), and docking/synchronization--a replacement for UWB, which hasn't lit up the market yet, but is at least available right now.
Multi-Gbps wireless LAN networking would be a hoot in the home, especially as we push data to networked storage devices and move ever-larger video and photo files around, but the standard's real potential is in providing for lossless high-definition streaming alongside these other purposes.
The group has been working together for a year, and chose this moment to makes its public debut. A standard is due out in fourth quarter, with testing to follow. WiGig intends to bring its work to the IEEE group on 60 GHz wireless LAN (802.11ad), and many WiGig members are also Wi-Fi Alliance members and IEEE participants. It's possible that 802.11ad will look a lot or entirely like WiGig. WiGig will also create a testing plan and carry out certification.
Bill McFarland, chief technical officer at Atheros, said in an interview today that it's clear consumers will wind up moving increasingly more data around the home. "People will end up with large files and high data rate streams. They're going to want to be able to move it flexibly," he said. Rather than have multiple chips dedicated to different purposes, WiGig is trying to unite it all under one banner.
McFarland noted that 60 GHz has a big advantage: 7 GHz of available in the U.S. and much of the world. "This very broad piece of bandwidth that we can use without licenses, without paying, and it allows us to use it in kind of big chunks, where we can get to very high data rates"--multiple gigabits per second.
The high data rates allow uncompressed HD video--roughly 3 Gbps--which avoids the current expense, possible image degradation, and latency of adding H.264 chips or other compression hardware between the transmitter and receiver.
The WiGig group isn't intending its standard as a Wi-Fi competitor; 60 GHz attenuates rapidly and doesn't penetrate objects well. This limits it to mostly in-room purposes. Wi-Fi in 802.11n can work well throughout a house. The idea of tri-band (2.4/5/60 GHz) chips seems like a reasonable path to take.
I asked McFarland how this 60 GHz effort would avoid the pitfalls of ultrawideband's rocky 7-year road to potential oblivion. He noted that there's no other spectrum available that enables multiple Gbps, and that by bringing together a set of companies involved through the development and marketing chain they can avoid the strife that delayed and may have doomed UWB.
When UWB was initially proposed, the FCC hadn't approved it. Ultimately, regulators worldwide allow UWB, but some have highly restricted the spectrum range, which reduces the number of simultaneous networks and devices, and requires more flexibility in product design. The 60 GHz effort starts with worldwide regulation already in place.
Ultimately, UWB took so long from design to market that "the data rates that UWB offered were not significantly higher than what could be achieved using 11n technology, so there was no strong, compulsive drive" to put UWB in hardware. (UWB started to make noise when Wi-Fi's highest rate was 11 Mbps, remember.)
Mark Grodzinsky, the marketing vice president of startup Wilocity, a firm that will develop chips and reference (and someone who was deeply involved in reconciling 802.11n into a viable standard), said of the 13 firms on the board of directors, "This is a group of companies that really knows how to do this and has done it before very well." Combined, they sell billions of wireless chips each year.
The intent with WiGig is to have several key differentiators that make the technology have multiple factors that can't be achieved with anything today, and that aren't likely to be achieved by any other technology the drawing board. This includes the high speed, but also the notion of multiple applications using a single radio. (This is how Bluetooth has managed to thrive, and it was one of the intents of the WiMedia Alliance for UWB.)
Grodzinsky described wireless docking and wireless display as two capabilities that are highly limited with any technology today. If you have a device capable of eSATA, gigabit Ethernet, and multiple USB streams, but the dock connection is 480 Mbps USB 2.0 or even wireless USB, performance is highly throttled down. A wireless display isn't really possible.
WiGig was also conceived with handheld devices front and center: characteristics that keep power use low are part of the spec from the get-go. Grodzinsky said, for instance, that error correction schemes are only used if errors need to be corrected; other wireless burn cycles on fixing errors when they don't exist.
WiGig's board of directors includes major chipmakers in the wireless space (Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, and Marvell), handset firms (LG, Nokia, and Samsung), PC-focused companies (Dell, Intel, and Microsoft), and consumer electronics manufacturers (NEC, Panasonic, and Samsung). Note there's some overlap among those firms' markets, too. Notably absent is Apple, which rarely joins standards groups at their inception, but is often an early adopter and later board member. Sony is also missing from this list. (Four other firms are "contributors" and not on the board, including more chipmakers.)
SiBeam is also not on the list, although its backers Panasonic and Samsung are. SiBeam is part of the WirelessHD Consortium, which is backed by six firms in the WiGig group, plus Sony and Toshiba. There will have to be a merger or some kind of close association between WirelessHD and WiGig because no TV set or computer will have two sets of chips, and WirelessHD doesn't have a data-transfer focus.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:35 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: 802.11n, Future, Video | 1 Comment
So claims a Verizon spokesperson: In an article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Comcast's possible plans to follow Cablevision's lead in pairing Wi-Fi with cable broadband are examined. But you have to read the last paragraph first to get the full impact. Verizon thinks it's a marketing stunt for Cablevision to spend $300m to cover the tri-state area of its franchises with Wi-Fi.
Let's start on the telco side. DSL from the central office into people's homes is dead, more or less, despite tens of millions of deployed lines. It's last century's technology. AT&T and Verizon have put their future into rolling out two different methods of fiber: AT&T prefers fiber to the node (FTTN), where they use very high speed DSL from a neighborhood termination point. DSL works extremely well over very short distances. Verizon has chosen the more expensive option of bringing fiber directly to the home (FTTH).
Read the rest of "Cablevision's Wi-Fi a Stunt?"
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:19 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cluelessness, Future, Home, Hot Spot | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Femtocells arrive: Femtocells are cellular base stations the size of typical home broadband modems and gateways, one step below office-building picocells, designed to enhance a mobile carrier's network in interior spaces. I've been skeptical of femtocells for the several years in which they've been discussed as the Next Big Thing Next Year.
Apparently, 2009 is next year. Sprint introduced its Airave last year, Verizon just released its Network Extender, and AT&T slipped up and revealed plans for its 3G MicroCell, which is apparently 2 to 5 months away.
Femtocells vary from VoIP over Wi-Fi (whether via T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home or Skype over Wi-Fi using a USB headset) in that they use licensed frequencies for the area in which the femtocell operates. There's no chance of collision with other users, which makes voice calls for all three operators and data calls for AT&T (the only one of the three to support 3G data) consistent.
Sprint and Verizon's base stations allow up to 3 simultaneous voice calls. AT&T allows up to 4 simultaneous 3G voice calls or data connections. Sprint and Verizon's femtocells work with all existing 2G-compatible handsets, which is pretty much everything; AT&T is restricting its femtocell to 3G for a lot of sensible reasons.
I've written extensively about femtocell announcements and some of the carriers' strategy over in my general tech reporting gig at Ars Technica, but let me run down how this fits into the wireless data world.
Read the rest of "Femtocellarama: Carriers Opting for In-Home Base Station Offerings"
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:08 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, Cellular, Future, Voice | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Let's look back and forward: It's traditional to wrap up the year, during a quiet news period, by looking at what just went by. This is the one time of year that I also prognosticate, and I got lucky: My forecast for 2008 made a year ago turns out to be weirdly accurate. I don't mean to take too much credit, though: I was expecting big news from things in 2008 that were much quieter affairs.
In-flight Internet (over Wi-Fi). It took almost until the end of the year, but this expectation finally became fulfilled not quite in the form or extent I envisioned. Several companies are separately pursuing offering in-flight Internet, but only Aircell managed to put the service into planes. American Airlines, Virgin America, and Delta Airlines all lofted flights in 2008 with broadband on board.
Of course, the expectation was that between 300 and 500 planes would be equipped with one vendor or another's flavor of in-flight Internet in 2008. Instead, the total is about 25 to 30 across those three airlines. Ryan Air's multi-year promise to put OnAir service on its European routes hasn't yet gone into public trials. Southwest and Alaska's promised tests of Wi-Fi appear to be invisible.
Still, Alaska and JetBlue both told me that there's work ahead in 2009, and Delta said it would equip over 300 planes in 2009 in its fleet, and start equipping its merger partner Northwestern Airlines with Internet service in 2009 as well.
We can count 2008 as the year in-flight Internet taxied down the runway; 2009 will likely be the year that it takes off. Whether it's financially viable is a different story; but it appears that service will be available on perhaps 20 to 30 percent of wide-body jetsfor routes within the U.S. in 2009.
Wi-Fi in every smartphone. Here, I feel I nailed it. It wasn't too much to call this, but Research in Motion and other established phone makers still seemed to have a slight resistence to including Wi-Fi. Now, it's de rigeur. The iPhone 3G and first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, shipped in 2009 with Wi-Fi along with Bluetooth, 2G and 3G radios, and GPS. Wireless all around. The BlackBerry Storm was widely criticized for being an iPhone me-too without the quality, but also because it lacked Wi-Fi; most other new BlackBerrys are fully Wi-Fi'd.
Tens of millions of smartphones now have Wi-Fi built in--about 10 million of those are iPhones alone. I'm not sure if the industry tracks this, but the mark of 100 million Wi-Fi equipped smartphones will certainly hit in the first quarter of 2009.
The new trend I call for 2009 is the inclusion of Wi-Fi in so-called feature phones, the inexpensive phones that offer far more limited capabilities than smartphones. Talking to chipmakers and handset makers in 2008 made it clear that Wi-Fi chips will be available in early 2009 with low-enough power at an inexpensive price with better integration for multiple wireless standards. This makes it affordable and keeps batteries from being drained.
Carriers want Wi-Fi as a way to offload usage from celluar networks, especially in people's home, and putting Wi-Fi into feature phones gives carriers an advantage in stretching scarce spectrum even further.
Wi-Fi everywhere. With municipal Wi-Fi in its 2004-2006 form dead in 2007 and buried in the first half of 2008, we've seen a resurgence in efforts to put a plan in place first (why do we need Wi-Fi or some other wireless technology?) and then build a network.
In a round-up for Ars Technica six weeks ago, I highlighted several cities that have working large-scale networks all built for slightly different purposes. These networks are all successful in the sense that they have been built and appear to be working for the purpose for which they were intended. Only time will tell--another year or even two--as to whether the long-term benefits or sustainability are there.
I also said a year ago that 2008 would be the year of hotspot saturation. I think I was right on that. It's hard to find any venue in North America and Europe that lacks Wi-Fi. Boingo's acquisition of Opti-Fi airports and Parsons's Washington State Ferry operations, along with AT&T's purchase of Wayport demonstrated that consolidation had arrived, too. (Wayport operated Wi-Fi in U.S. McDonald's locations, and managed AT&T's Wi-Fi hotspots.)
Starbucks switching to AT&T and offering loyalty-based free service to customers, as well as AT&T radically expanding free access to its hotspot network, dramatically expanded the ability to get Wi-Fi for nothing.
Years ago, I was somewhat excoriated for saying that Wi-Fi hotspot access will either be free or cost you $20. Some people insisted Wi-Fi would trend to zero--some even cite Starbucks 2-hours-a-day loyalty reward as proof, even though you need to make a regular purchase to get the "free" service. Others insisted that you would need several subscriptions, each at $20 to $40 per month, to have a national or international personal footprint.
I wasn't too far off, in the end. If you want, there are now extensive networks in the U.S. and Europe of free hotspots and AT&T gives free Wi-Fi to about 15 to 20 million customers. The Fon network, however you count it, seemingly offers reciprocal free Wi-Fi to as many as hundreds of thousands of its Foneros.
If you want a larger pool of access at premium venues, especially airports and hotels, you can pay a bit more than $20 per month--maybe I should give myself the benefit of inflation, since I've been saying $20 for a few years? Boingo offers unlimited Wi-Fi for North America for $21.95 per month; iPass includes dial-up and Ethernet service as well for $29.95 per month. (Internationally, aggregators meter service because of the exceedingly high cost in some markets. You can get a few thousand minutes a month for about $45 with iPass or $60 with Boingo.)
WiMax arrives. Again, slipping in towards the 11th hour, my prediction that WiMax would be deployed widely enough to see whether it works wasn't precisely what happened. WiMax is commercially available in one market--Baltimore--although reports from reviewers and residents seem to all be positive.
The new Clearwire, a product of the old Clearwire firm and the WiMax division and spectrum portfolio of Sprint Nextel, will launch its first market under the Clear product name in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 6 (badly timed before CES and Macworld Expo). Then they'll start rolling out cities on a regular basis.
Gadget-Fi a go-go. I'm now going on about 3 years of saying that next year, Wi-Fi will be in everything. It's getting there. I'm still waiting for a good implementation of Wi-Fi in a camera, but at least the Eye-Fi adapter--which debuted in 2007 and expanded options in 2008--provides a good substitute.
Apple apparently shipped a jillion iPod touch players; they don't reveal specific model unit shipments, but it's possible that several million iPod touch models are in people's hands.
What's Coming in 2009?
A real security meltdown for some version of WPA. I hate to say this, because it sounds like fear mongering, but after the clever but not significant WPA exploit revealed a few weeks ago, it's clear to me that worse is to come. We will likely see the death of the TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) flavor of 802.11i (supported in WAP and WPA2), at least in the pre-shared key/Personal flavor in 2009 due to additional weaknesses that relate to backwards compatibility with the long-depreated WEP.
Whatever attack results, it will likely still require a lot of effort on the part of the attacker, but will have a chilling effect, and move more people to the AES-CCMP flavor of encryption available only in WPA2.
LTE. Long Term Evolution, the GSM-evolved fourth-generation (4G) cell data standard, should appear in commercial form in 2010, but we're going to hear a lot about it in 2009. We may even see some test markets. Verizon sounds like they promised at least one production market for regular use.
LTE and WiMax convergence. There's apparently enough interest in converging the mismatched elements of LTE and WiMax that we may see a full-fledged convergence effort in 2009. This would mean that nearly all 4G efforts worldwide could come together around two intercompatible standards.
Train Fi. Yes, I've been writing about Internet access in trains for a few years. It's finally arrived. The faster cellular data speeds, the brief huge spike in oil prices, and lengthy tests that have concluded successfully are finally leading to Wi-Fi-based access being installed on commuter and long-haul trains worldwide. In the U.S., the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area could wind up being the largest such deployment in 2009. But train-Fi has broken out all over.
SMS Fi. Twitter or a firm like it will move to supplant the ridiculous cost of SMS, especially for smartphone owners with unlimited data plans, by offering an SMS-like service for a pittance with gateway service to existing SMS offerings. Wi-Fi and 3G will be the preferred method. With carriers pursuing predatory pricing on SMS, the only universal messaging format, an alternative will be formed out of the pressure. Coal becomes diamond.
Very high speed Wi-Fi's first steps. In 2008, representatives most from chipmakers worked through the formation of two new 802.11 task groups for Very High Throughput wireless LANs: one, formed late in the year, 802.11ac will cover frequencies below 6 GHz; the other, likely to be 802.11ad, will cover the 60 GHz band, used for millimeter-band radar and with SiBeam's video streaming approach. The goal is for 1 Gbps or faster raw throughput rates. A timeline isn't yet set; given how the group and manufacturers work, it might be 2010 before we see 802.11ac devices and longer for 802.11ad.
What Was Hot in 2008?
The top stories by page views for 2008 were mostly stories from years before. While readers were most interested in T-Mobile losing its Starbucks contract to AT&T (February), they also looked at a pair of 2003 items on WPA passphrase weakness (my introduction and a paper on the topic), perused my outdated 2006 essay on not buying into early Draft N gear, and followed a dead link from an item about installing a free WPA client (no longer available) for Windows 2000.
Also in 2008, readers were equally interested in a third-quarter 2008 review of Linksys's WRT610 router--but more people read the 2007 review of the preceding WRT600 model. And apparently people still aren't changing their WRT54G's admin password, given that it's the No. 4 story for 2008, but published in 2004.
Perversely, a top story in 2008 was a review I wrote in 2004 of an early Wi-Fi signal finder, a category of product that now seems tediously useless. Showing that people are interesting in what Wi-Fi means (literally), a 2005 story on the origins of the choice of the Wi-Fi name still gets a lot of attention.
Of the top 15 or so stories, all but 2 were from before 2008, and three-quarters were about security.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:07 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Industry | No Comments
The folks at Quantenna made a splash with their "1 Gbps" Wi-Fi announcement today: Venture-backed chipmaker Quantenna says that they have a tiny chip that should make it easier and cheaper to push high throughput Wi-Fi around a home using wall-outlet adapters. The company claims 450 Mbps of throughput from the highest-end Draft N standard (600 Mbps raw), and that it has a 1 Gbps wireless offering that uses multiple bands and channels to achieve throughput. There's not enough detail to know how proprietary that is, or if it's a form of channel bonding.
Quantenna announced three chipsets and a reference design: simultaneous dual band at raw rates up to 1 Gbps, 5 GHz at up to 600 Mbps, and 2.4 GHz at up to 450 Mbps. The reference design is for a compact wall outlet Wi-Fi extender.
The company said it's using a proprietary version of the 802.11s mesh protocol to allow devices to interact with each other. Quantenna's focus appears to be on spreading signals across a house, such as with streaming high-definition, where lots of bandwidth will be needed as telcos, satellite operators, and cable firms deliver HDTV into homes today, but plan much more in the future. Storing HD and then being able to have multiple live streams sent among devices is apparently the wet dream of those involved in home entertainment.
You can be clever about pushing HD around a home (like Ruckus) or brute force it by flooding an area with high throughput like Quantenna, which isn't a bad strategy, but it's an interesting one. The fact is that there are already market solutions that don't require 450 Mbps of net throughput. The segment they're looking at seems too well developed and small for them to capture a sizeable chunk when products based on their design are released in mid-2009. And as a startup, their ability to sign deals with firms that sometimes take 1 to 2 years to negotiate and sign makes me wonder; their investors might be brokering those deals to make them conclude faster.
Small, integrated chips make a big splash because they reduce the battery drain on mobile devices, allow the use of these chips in handhelds, and can dramatically drop the cost of manufacture both through a reduced bill of materials and reduced assembly costs. Quantenna told several sources that they expect to charge $20 for a single-band chipset and $40 for a dual-band chipset in quantity. For chipmakers these days, that can mean from 100,000 to 1m before the price drop happens. (It used to mean much more, but efficiencies have improved in smaller lots of chipmaking, apparently.)
I've followed chip announcements in the Wi-Fi space for years, and small startups that have unique offerings tend to either get swallowed up in short order (Airgo into Qualcomm) or disappear (the very promising Engim\). Atheros, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Marvell, CSR, and a few others own the market, and that's just how that is. Chipmakers in this industry segment needs millions and then tens of millions of sales to make it possible to recover their R&D costs while sinking money into future R&D for the inevitable next generation.
(Airgo, I might note, was sucked into Qualcomm and sunk without a trace, although it's likely their patents were part of what was of interest; their approach to building MIMO systems was probably integrated into other product lines and multi-standard chips.)
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 3:48 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: 802.11n, Chips, Future | No Comments
Organizers of day-long discussion about ubiquitous mobile broadband want to know what you want to ask: In Philadelphia on 22-Sept-2008, panelists from AT&T, Comcast, Sprint XOHM, The Wharton School, and Network Acquisition Corporation (the folks who will be operating the former EarthLink network in Phila.) will be on one stage at 6 pm at The Franklin Institute's Planetarium (free, $5 contribution requested, advance registration recommended).
The panel will discuss fourth-generation (4G) networks, including both LTE and WiMax, and discuss what these networks might deliver, as well as how Wi-Fi networks fit into this future.
One of the organizers asked if I'd solicit questions--you can post them below--which they'll try to ask during the panel. The group would then write up responses which could posted in turn here.
The powerhouse that is Kevin Werbach, a professor at The Wharton School, is moderating the event. Werbach has been part of interesting thinking about spectrum for many years, a former editor of Release 1.0, and a former FCC staffer. He'll share the stage with a fairly high-powered crowd, including AT&T's enterprise architect for mobility, the president of NAC, and senior people from Comcast and Sprint Xohm.
The event is part of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter series called MobileMonday, an interesting business group that's trying to provoke discussion and development around mobile technology and access. This particular event is sponsored by local business development organization Select Greater Philadelphia.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:10 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Conferences, Future | No Comments
An Intel-backed startup, Ozmo, plans low-power Wi-Fi protocol modification to compete with Bluetooth technology: Ozmo has developed chips for wireless peripherals like headphones, headsets, and handhelds (the three H's?) as well as mice and keyboards that pair with special driver software for computers to enable a 9 Mbps Wi-Fi-based PAN (personal area network) at the same time a computer is connected via Wi-Fi to a wireless LAN (local area network).
Ozmo apparently is trying to leverage the ubiquity of Wi-Fi, the market reach of Intel (which has invested in the firm and is pushing its technology), and the dissatisfaction with Bluetooth device association and throughput to stick a wedge into Bluetooth's market domination. Well over a billion Bluetooth chipsets have shipped--CSR alone has shipped over a billion--and estimates put half a billion this year into cell phones alone. So there's a large embedded market to overcome.
This new technology, so far unnamed but apparently part of Intel's Cliffside research program, is trying to reduce complexity by reducing the number of standards needed to drive a computer, while increasing the flexibility of those standards. Ozmo and Intel's system would, for instance, allow a simultaneous WLAN connection and a PAN network of up to 8 devices using a single radio on a computer.
The press releases and articles make it quite unclear whether a new Wi-Fi chip would be needed; that chip would almost certainly not conform to today's Wi-Fi standards except in a compatibility mode, given that Wi-Fi has no capacity for PAN-style connections. Ad hoc mode isn't quite the same thing. In the past, extensions to the 802.11 standards that are the basis of the Wi-Fi certification and service mark were allowed as long as basic 802.11 worked as expected.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have been complementary technologies for several years. There were early conflicts--I wrote an article about the severe problems in using Bluetooth 1.1 and 802.11b back in 2001! But those interference and coordination issues were resolved, and Blueooth and Wi-Fi marched forward hand in hand, without any close association between the two trade groups behind the standards and branding, but with a lot of technology acquisitions and mergers on the part of companies that make Wi-Fi gear.
The Bluetooth SIG has been working for years to put Bluetooth on top of ultrawideband (UWB), which is still not readily available in the marketplace. UWB is always next year's big technology, and may be passed by except for applications like high-definition video streaming among a/v electronics. The SIG also announced support in Oct. 2007 for Bluetooth + 802.11, where a Bluetooth device could initiate high-speed transfers using 802.11 (yes, Wi-Fi, but not by that name; no partnership there). Bluetooth plus UWB is likely not available until 2009 at this point; BT and Wi-Fi, not until perhaps 2010. (See my article, "Bluetooth to Add Wi-Fi with UWB Delays in Mind," 2007-10-31.)
It's hard to see how Ozmo builds a place in this infrastructure, even with higher bandwidth, and what Ozmo says is lower power use and a lower cost for their chips, because laptop and desktop makers will need to buy into the Intel/Ozmo ecosystem. The demand for this kind of technology is typically driven by users who buy one component and need their computer to interface with it.
With Ozmo and Intel apparently planning to debut the Wi-Fi chips and driver support next year, it seems like a multi-year process to figure out whether Ozmo can evolve a competitive position to Bluetooth, even as Bluetooth is estimated to be embedded in over 1.2b cell phones by 2012.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:04 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Bluetooth, Future | No Comments
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.
Read the rest of "Can Azulstar Make WiMax Work without Buying Spectrum?"
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:58 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal, Unique, WiMAX | No Comments
Even the losers win in this auction: The gag order from the FCC over the bidding and results of the 700 MHz spectrum auction were lifted yesterday, and everyone is jabbering. Verizon and AT&T have announced they'll build LTE (Long Term Evolution) cell data networks, a GSM standard, in the 700 MHz band. AT&T says their network will come online starting in 2012; Verizon, 2010.
Google posted on their own blog and told the New York Times that they were happy enough losing, even though they bid to win...sort of. They raised their own bids a few times to keep interest from other players, but were relieved when another bidder topped them. That turned out to be Verizon Wireless. Google managed to get a few types of openness encoded into the band, and they think (rightly so) that it made a difference. An economist notes in the Times article that Google now only has to spend "$1 million a year on a law firm to ensure Verizon lives up to the openness requirements."
AT&T didn't bid on the C Block that Google was discussing, a set of licenses that provide national coverage in a few easy pieces. Rather, they focused on acquiring 700 MHz spectrum before the auction from Aloha Partners (from the previous 700 MHz auction), and spending billions on smaller licenses all over the country that they can pin together. Those licenses are unencumbered by open device, application, and service provisions, so AT&T thinks they got the better deal. A good summary is at Phone Mag.
Verizon for its part said it was pleased with its national-scope licenses. Despite AT&T acquiring lots of spectrum, it's going to be far easier for Verizon to use these nationally defined bands, with consistent performance across all their networks.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:45 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Financial, Future, Regulation, Spectrum | 1 Comment
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:36 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Spectrum | No Comments
Apple adds enterprise features to the iPhone, including 802.1X, and opens it to developers: Today's announcement from Steve Jobs was full of surprises, including the fact that Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync for full Exchange support, and the level at which developers will have access to iPhone hardware and information.
The 2.0 software, free to all current owners of iPhone, will be available in June, which kind of tips the hand as to when we'll see a 3G iPhone, too, I imagine. iPod touch owners will pay a "nominal" upgrade fee, as Apple books iPhone revenue over 24 months and iPod revenue as units are sold.
Apple will pile in all the stuff that enterprises demanded from Research in Motion in the Blackberry platform--and that RIM built in--including support for 802.1X (including WPA2 Enterprise) for authenticated Wi-Fi login, two-factor authentication, certificates, and additional VPN types. They're also adding "remote bricking," a critical feature that allows a stolen or misused phone to be remotely and securely wiped.
On the developer side, Apple is opening up the whole puppy in a way that I didn't expect. I assumed the firm would put limits on whether the cell data connection could be used by apps, but not restrict the Wi-Fi side. The announcement puts nothing off limits except VoIP over cell data, although there's a list of characteristics that software can't contain, such as being malicious or a bandwidth hog. All software is distributed and installed via App Store, available on an iPhone or in iTunes for synchronization. This includes free software. Apple will therefore vet, and ostensibly be able to halt use of programs that exhibit behavior they deem bad. Jobs said, "We can turn off the spigot if we need to." Every app will be signed by a developer certificate.
Developers can have access to location information provided by Google (cell towers) and Skyhook (Wi-Fi) for use in their programs. No mention was made of privacy settings for such. Skyhook's Loki toolbar requires that you grant permission to Web sites that want to obtain your location details; I expect a system-wide approach to that, too.
No mention was made today of a few particular problems with iPhone security, such as the ability to tunnel and traverse a VPN across multiple network media, such as using an iPhone for a secure connection while you travel from work, across the EDGE network, and to hotspots. This likely could be built on top of the enterprise features. You'd also need policy management, such as disallowing certain kinds of connections without a VPN being active or over non-trusted Wi-Fi networks.
Certainly, this is a big step forward for corporate users, mobile applications, and consumer ease on the iPhone platform. The beta is available today to developers; you can become a developer for $99. Amazingly, Apple's developer site crashed and is still unavailable two hours after the press conference ended.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:05 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Enterprise, Future, Hot Spot, Location, Security | No Comments
While driving by the Fremont Troll, I explain the new flat-rate paradigm of carriers, driven by competition from Wi-Fi, Skype, and other factors
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:32 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Financial, Future, Voice | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Yesterday was pretty overwhelming, trying to sort out all the facts, and the impact: The bits and pieces of this industry-changing deal will keep shaking out until and past the launch. I have some detritus from yesterday to catch up on, as well as some new analysis of what this means. (You can also read my coverage in The Seattle Times, where I discuss this as more of a general business story.)
The Starbucks Card and free access: The press release from Starbucks and three conversations I had with them yesterday finally made clear what the free 2-hours access requires. You need a Starbucks Card, which is their stored-value card, not a credit card. (Their Starbucks Duetto credit card will, however, also qualify.) Starbucks Cards can be purchased at a store with a minimum fill of $5.00 that you can use to buy stuff at the store. Once you have the card, free Wi-Fi service is activated by a single purchase of any amount on the card every 30 days. No purchase is needed each time you use the free Wi-Fi nor for the 30 days following a purchase! (A reader asked whether you also had to be an AT&T subscriber. No.)
AT&T's network scope and pricing: AT&T isn't very clear about what they include in various free and fee roaming packages. After consulting their Wi-Fi site and talking to an AT&T spokesperson yesterday, I think I have the story. DSL, fiber, and business remote-access customers (the 12m we've been discussing) get the Basic package included at no cost, which isn't 17,000 (with Starbucks included) but isn't far off. It's McDonald's (8,500) plus Starbucks (7,000) plus Barnes & Noble (several hundred) and a few other chains/venues and airports that AT&T operates itself. Most U.S. hotels and airports operated by other providers require a Premier subscription, which also adds 53,000 international locations. For those who get Basic for free, the Premier subscription is $10.00 per month; all others, Premier is the only option for a subscription, and it's $20 per month. Pricing is explained, but not very clearly, on their Wi-Fi page; you have to look at that page and then at the location finder to sort this out.
AT&T Wireless customers: There's no deal here for anyone but DSL, fiber, and remote-access business customers. Those will cell plans don't (yet) get anything special. That includes...
...The iPhone: No iPhone update yesterday, but everyone I interviewed was winking slyly.
Media in the stores, and Apple: Starbucks chief technical officer as much as told me that Starbucks has Apple media servers in their stores that feed out songs and previews based on what's programmed in the stores. The move from there to caching digital movie rentals and popular downloads is very, very small. I've written a long piece explaining this for Mac journal TidBITS: Starbucks Deal Brewed with AT&T Has Hints of Apple. You're going to walk into Starbucks, log onto free or cheap Wi-Fi, and download a movie for rental in a few minutes from the local network.
3G iPhone: Oh, yeah, I predict Starbucks will be part of the launch plan for the 3G iPhone, which I would now wager will appear in second quarter because that's when AT&T will have some markets up and running with Wi-Fi in the coffeeshops.
Location: Starbucks CTO Chris Bruzzo also emphasized community, location, and digital experience. He had few specifics, but the idea of bringing in portable devices, like cameras and games, and spending time interacting online in some fashion, yet to be described, with a community that's highly local to the store seemed the theme. He also mentioned location-based services in passing, since each store obviously has a fixed location; T-Mobile was providing some location-based information before this, but more extensive offerings sounds planned. Bruzzo was hip about broadcasting Web services that devices on the network would pick up, instead of talking about a Web browser to Web server equation, which is more laptop oriented.
Many devices, one account: You'll be able to use the same account or Starbucks Card code to bring multiple devices online at the same time, within reason. Bruzzo at Starbucks said it would be handled in a reasonable fashion; an iPhone and laptop logged in at the same time wouldn't cause the system to complain. They'll track MAC addresses--that's adapter unique IDs--to avoid real abuse.
Wi-Fi as glue between home and true mobility: AT&T also told me yesterday that the abundance of "free" in this deal had to do with cementing a customer's connection seamlessly along whatever they do. Joe Izbrand, a spokesperson, said, "The benefit is in our ability to continue to big the largest Wi-Fi connect, to deliver converged connectivity across the board, it's part of what we're trying to do to keep people connected no matter what they're doing, on the home, on the road, whatever. In the competitive marketplace, that's a real differentiator."
T-Mobile and Starbucks: As noted yesterday, T-Mobile data subscribers will have fee-free roaming access onto Starbucks when the transition to AT&T happens in each store, for now and "for years to come" according to a revised statement released late in the afternoon yesterday by T-Mobile. The statement also clarifies that T-Mobile HotSpot@Home customers who use the converged cell/Wi-Fi handsets for calling over either kind of network will also be included in this. The deal lasts "at least the next five years." I don't have details on this, but I have been told that the transfer of provider was abrupt, and I suspect that Starbucks made this a condition of the AT&T deal to avoid any of its customers being upset by a service transition. While numbers of monthly subscribers have never been released, it's likely in the 100,000 to 125,000 range. I can't see many fewer, and it's hard to see decisions T-Mobile made if the number was much larger.
Wayport's catbird seat: The first person I called when I heard about the deal was Dan Lowden at Wayport, a long-time executive who has been through all the changes in the market. Wayport is AT&T's managed service partner, and has the direct contract with McDonald's, to which Wayport resells access to AT&T; they're picking up 7,000 more locations to manage through this deal. "I think this is some of the biggest news in the industry ever," Lowden said, and I am loathe to disagree; the only other news that might qualify as "bigger" were failures, such as the shutdown of Cometa, which ultimately has made little difference in the market's evolution. In fact, the original Starbucks deal with MobileStar in 2001 was one of the factors that launched hotspot deployment at a faster pace. I asked Lowden about the role of mobile devices in their networks. "We work with a lot of these device manufacturers as they're coming to market" to ensure a good connection experience, Lowden said.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:55 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Financial, Future, Hot Spot, Media | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Bluetooth SIG says a 2009 standard will integrate Bluetooth and 802.11 in a tighter, more complementary relationship: The group that controls the Bluetooth standard continues the evolution towards agnosticism about underlying radio stuff. The latest move takes advantage of the side-by-side deployment of the "winning" wireless specifications: Bluetooth for PAN (Personal Area Networks) and Wi-Fi for WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks). Bigger files will automatically be sent over Wi-Fi. Sounds simple, no?
"Bluetooth is great right now for sending some of these less bulky data files," said senior marketing manager Kevin Keating, but with the "bulk transfer of entertainment data, whether it's piles of MP3s or a bunch of vacation photos you want to move off your cameras or on your PC, it's not really built for that."
The SIG made this announcement this afternoon at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona; Bluetooth is built into hundreds of millions of cell phones worldwide in its current form, and is near two billion devices shipped in all form factors. That number went from 1 to 2 billion in about two years.
The new standard, called Bluetooth High Speed, will allow a Bluetooth adapter and drivers to identify bulk transfers and move them from the lower-powered and slower Bluetooth radio technology to more battery intensive, but faster 802.11.
They're really talking about 802.11 and Wi-Fi nearly interchangably, but this standard doesn't yet have any formal involvement from the SIG's counterpart, the Wi-Fi Alliance, which controls the certification process for Wi-Fi and the trademark. Keating said, "Wi-Fi is its own brand, and we've talked."
It's important to remember that Bluetooth is both a set of profiles that define behavior--applications and schemas for data in those applications--and a radio standard. Bluetooth was originally developed with its own communications spec (the MAC and PHY, in technical terms) that worked at 1 Mbps; the 2.0+EDR and 2.1+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) bumped that to 3 Mbps. (Version 2.1 also dramatically simplifies pairing between devices; it's rolling out widely now.)
These profiles include things like HID (Human Interface Device) for keyboards and input devices, DNP for dial-up networking, GOEP (Generic Object Exchange Profile) for file transfer, and so forth. The profiles are at a layer of abstraction above the interface and radio part, which makes it relatively simple to repurpose them across many radio standards.
In that vein, the Bluetooth SIG has already disclosed plans for its support for ultrawideband (UWB), whenever PCs with UWB or adapters start appearing in great provision, and their own ultra low power version of Bluetooth for things like heart-rate monitor, bike cyclometers sensors, and other low-data-rate devices.
The Bluetooth SIG says prototypes using the high-speed standard will be tested this year, with a published spec due in mid-2009, and devices presumably long before the end of 2009.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:00 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Bluetooth, Future, Standards | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Speculation is rampant around early glimpse of Macworld Expo banners: The banners (normally not seen until after the keynote) read "There's something in the air," which David Morgenstern speculates could refer to the inclusion of mobile WiMax (which he bucks the trend and calls WiMax Mobile, for some reason). I hesitate to stick my neck on the line, but I think it's unlikely Apple would push mobile WiMax at this point. But I've been wrong before.
Back in 2003, I said that Apple wouldn't introduce 802.11g products at the January Macworld Expo event because 802.11g wasn't yet well baked, and Apple wouldn't expose its customers to months of firmware updates and incompatibility issues with other Wi-Fi adapters and base stations. I was wrong! It took eight months of firmware fixes to get 802.11g just right, but we lived through.
In 2007, I thought it unlikely that despite the presence of what seemed like 802.11n chips in many Intel-based Macintoshes dissected by those interested in the innards that Apple would jump the gun on the standard which was still not clearly settled in its direction. Again, I was wrong: Apple pulled the trigger, and announced its 802.11n product and an activator for most Intel Core 2 Duo based Macs that had shipped to that point. A few days later, the IEEE group voted overwhelmingly to approve the draft of 802.11n that settled the issue as it moves to ratification.
Thus my track record is poor on Apple's wireless plans. Nonetheless, I think WiMax isn't in the cards. Rather, it's more likely for Apple to build in HSPA (high-speed packet access), the GSM evolution standard for 3G. I haven't seen this speculated elsewhere, so I may be totally off base, but here's my logic.
Mobile WiMax isn't yet deployed. With 802.11g and 802.11n, you could buy components from Apple and immediately use the higher speed for your own network. With Mobile WiMax, most Mac owners won't be able to access a network, for which they will have to subscribe or pay usage fees, until mid- to late 2008. People generally resent paying for technology they simply cannot use. Apple would also take a margin hit for including the internal adapter, which isn't in wide production yet.
In that light, HSPA is a more reasonable choice with its few hundred Kbps upstream and several hundred Kpbs downstream average performance. AT&T, its iPhone partner, already has HSPA networks deployed in the U.S.; it's determined to roll them out nationally, although its unclear what areas have the slower UMTS standard--faster than EDGE, slower than HSPA--and which have HSPA. (HSPA is often labled as HSDPA for the 3.6 Mbps or 7.2 Mbps raw "downlink" flavor and HSUPA for the 1.9 Mbps or 5.8 Mbps upstream flavors.)
The 3G iPhone will incorporate HSPA, and thus it would make sense for Apple to not be building in technology that's tied to a rival--Sprint Nextel--to its main and exclusive phone carrier partner.
What's more likely, however, is that the "in the air" has something to do with streaming media, a revised Apple TV, and new content than with a new network standard. But given my 0 for 2 record, you might want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:52 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Consumer Electronics, Future, WiMAX | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The rise and fall of muni-Fi (and rise again): Clearly, the largest story involving Wi-Fi in 2007 was the at-first continued growth in cities awarding contracts with no money involved on their part to have service providers build Wi-Fi networks--and the subsequent failure of these networks to be built. Starting quietly in late 2006, the market shifted for metro-scale Wi-Fi. During 2007, providers decided that bearing the full cost of a city-wide network without city contracts wasn't financially sensible.
The full scope of the low uptake rates in cities that had large portions of the network built out also became clear: rather than 15 to 35 percent of residents subscribing, just a few percentage points would put a network in the top tier. Revenue is apparently also pretty minimal even in cities like Taipei, Taiwan, the network provider for which was predicting 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2006, and had just 30,000 regular users each month at last public report in early 2007.
MetroFi started to tell cities that without an advance service commitment at a minimum level -- an anchor tenancy -- the company couldn't proceed on networks. In 2007, MetroFi lost half a dozen bids or saw contracts canceled due to this change. Its work in Portland, Ore., the biggest network it was building, won't be extended beyond current limited dimensions until additional capital or a city commitment is obtained; the city has said it won't commit to service fees, however.
Meanwhile, EarthLink lost its CEO Garry Betty in January due to cancer. A strong backer of new initiatives to change EarthLink's core business, his death was certainly one of the causes in a quick re-evaluation of the municipal wireless division. New CEO Rolla Huff pulled EarthLink out of new deals, suspended existing ones, laid off hundreds of employees while gutting the metro Wi-Fi division, and appears poised to leave currently built or underway networks, including their flagship Philadelphia effort. They may sell the division, but it's hard to see much worth in it given the current state.
In a smaller bit of news, Kite Networks, formerly known by various names, was sold by parent MobilePro to Gobility with conditions that according to SEC filings by MobilePro weren't met. Kite was once high flying, in the company of EarthLink and MetroFi as one of the major U.S. Wi-Fi network builders. Now it's still in that company, with work on its Arizona networks apparently halted. A suitor has emerged in the form of a regional telecom that specializes in the Hispanophone market (double entendre intended), and which thinks it could boost Tempe subscriptions from the current several hundred to about 300 times that number. Hope springs eternal.
And while AT&T was able to launch a Riverside, Calif., network with MetroFi handling the installation and operation, it backed out of St. Louis, Mo., due to a utility pole problem, and the bidding in Chicago, too. The Metro Connect consortiums in Sacramento and Silcion Valley were unable to raise financing despite the apparent blue-chip participation by Cisco, IBM, and Intel.
County-wide Wi-Fi was also hit again and again by providers who pulled out--CenturyTel in Pierce County, Wash., for instance--or problems with technology or utility poles. In a few scattered areas, Wi-Fi across counties has been built out, but it's not an idea whose time has yet come.
Muni-Fi isn't down for the count. While these high-profile networks in large cities and county-wide networks have mostly hit the skids, more modest networks with well-defined goals continue to be built with a focus on public safety and municipal uses in hundreds of small and medium-sized towns. Brookline, Mass., may be a good example, in which a public safety/public access network was built relatively quickly and with no reported problems.
And there's one big city success story: Minneapolis, Minn. While local provider US Internet wound up spending more than they'd intended, reports from the ground indicate that service works quite well, and subscriptions and interest are quite high. The company was able to respond almost instantly to the bridge collapse a few months ago by deploying additional mesh infrastructure to add network capacity in the area. And it says that it could reach positive cash flow in early 2008. One of their advantages? They secured a substantial commitment from the city for the services they built.
Other trends of the year gone by: Music and Wi-Fi are clearly more aligned, with the new Zune models and firmware from Microsoft allowing wireless sync (but not yet Wi-Fi purchases), and the introduction of both the Apple iPhone and iTunes touch, which allow music purchases over Wi-Fi but not synchronization. (While the MusicGremlin preceded both the Zune and iPhone/iPod options, it didn't seem to gain any market traction in 2007.)
Security continues to be a concern in 2007, although less of one as home users have clearly accepted WPA Personal, at long last, and networks are increasingly encrypted through better software from major hardware manufacturers. Wizards make encryption a no-brainer, when they work. Corporations stung by reports and by requirements from credit card issuers are also clearly protecting their networks better, although I'm sure we'll still see breaches at those firms that didn't cross every "t."
The 802.11n standard's emergence into an interim certified Wi-Fi state was also a significant milestone for faster wireless networking. Shipments of Draft 802.11n products in 2007 increased significantly, while prices dropped so much that it makes perfect sense to purchase a $50 to $80 Draft N router than a comparable G unit. Manufacturers made it clear as the year progressed that hardware sold today should generally be firmware upgradable to whatever the final, not much changed 802.11n standard is when approved in 2008.
Gadget-Fi continued on the rise, as an increasing array of devices included Wi-Fi as a connectivity option. Most notably, T-Mobile launched its HotSpot@Home service, the largest scale offering of converged cell/Wi-Fi calling. By year's end, they had four handsets for sale--two plain, a BlackBerry, and a clamshell--but subscriber numbers are unknown.
What's coming in 2008?
In-flight Internet (over Wi-Fi): 2008 is finally the year. It was supposed to be 2005. Or maybe 2002. But we should see a number of planes, mostly flying over the U.S., equipped with either in-flight Internet access or in-flight text messaging and text email. Connexion by Boeing's failure fortunately didn't discourage a half a dozen competitors who were in the R&D phase when Boeing wrote off its satellite-based Internet access venture.
AirCell, Row 44, OnAir, Aeromobile, Panasonic Avionics, and a T-Mobile consortium are among the announced or nearly announced firms with commitments or trials underway. AirCell and Row 44, focused on the U.S. market, plan to deliver Internet not voice to fuselages; OnAir and Aeromobile are working on mobile-based services, including voice, via existing cell phones and devices.
In 2008, American, Alaska, and Virgin America will launch trials over the U.S., and potentially move into production. OnAir should be expanding in Europe beyond the single French aircraft that's equipped in a trial now to RyanAir's fleet. And Aeromobile's Qantas trial could turn into real usage. There's likely action that will happen in Asia and the Middle East, too, that's not yet disclosed.
Other trends to watch
Wi-Fi in every smartphone with better integration. The iPhone was the leading edge, pun intended, offering 2.5G EDGE cell networking as part of the subscription price, along with seamless roaming to Wi-Fi networks. With RIM finally offering BlackBerry models with Wi-Fi, it's unlikely that any future smartphone model intended for serious users would lack the option.
Wi-Fi everywhere. Despite the setbacks in municipal Wi-Fi, wireless networks continue to expand, with better and better coverage found across larger areas and more locations. 2008 might be the year of hotspot saturation.
WiMax arrives. In 2008, we'll finally see production mobile WiMax in action in the U.S., and the questions about whether it works well enough and fast enough at the right price to beat current generation cell data networks, and make money for the disorganized Sprint Nextel will be answered. More certainly, Clearwire, with WiMax as its only option, will push aggressively to steal customers away from fixed, wired broadband, especially in markets with little competition.
Gadget-Fi a go-go. Wi-Fi will become an expected part of gaming consoles (already found in a few), cameras (found in crippled form in just a handful), regular cell phones (in dozens and dozens now), and music players (with more full functionality).
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:41 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I'm trying to wrap my head around the series of announcements and developments this last week that will change the face of cell service, and notably wireless broadband in the U.S.: In short succession, you have:
Yes, it's Google, Google, Google all over. While Google's Android platform might not take off, it's pretty clear that the disruptive influence of Google combined with the WiMax direction chosen by Sprint Nextel are reforming the future of the industry. But WiMax might get left out of the dance.
You see, with Forsee out of Sprint and Zander out of Motorola, you have two major firms that were committed to WiMax looking for leaders who will come in and not continue doing precisely what lead to their predecessors being forced out. Which means WiMax will be on the chopping block. Motorola could write down its Clearwire investment and spin off its Expedience division bought from that company, while refocusing on 3G and 4G cell. Sprint could decide to deploy something entirely different in 2.5 GHz, even if that delayed network buildout, rather than investing billions in something that they're now not clear they want to move on.
On the consumer side, things are brighter. It's likely that by 2009, we will see substantial competition among devices--think about the diversity of digital cameras available in sizes, formats, and features--where we might pick a device first and then choose a carrier. Android could be part of that mix, but the FCC's pressure combined with market changes seem to be leading to cell networks in which you won't have the same kind of lock-in and commitment--it'll be more like Europe is but with greater competition reducing the cost of devices.
This openness could, in turn, supplant some of Wi-Fi's forward momentum as the de facto wireless technology to build into portable devices. Wi-Fi is a best effort technology, which means that it's not reliable. It's a contention medium and there's no company offering ubiquitous coverage--aggregators offer national and international subscriptions, but that's not the same thing. If the cost of making and certifying devices to use on a cellular network drops precipitously, and volume of chips sold would be one of those factors, it wouldn't be weird to buy a really good camera that has a 3G or 4G cell chip installed that you could use on a pay-as-you-go basis or as an add-on to an existing cell account you might have.
None of the cell carriers is particularly eager to allow more competition as that reduces margin, increases customer churn, and makes their returns more dependent on their short-term actions as people migrate around. But the fact that so many carriers are now promoting actions that will make life harder on them and their shareholders means clearly that the momentum is there for this change to sink in.
Google could sit back and do nothing, and they've already forced change. Sprint can't sit back and do nothing--but there's speculation Google might simply purchase them to pursue its goals. I doubt it, but Sprint will be a very different company within a year.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:24 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: 2.5G and 3G, 4G, Cellular, Future, Regulation | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
Dial-up is the cash cow of the broadband world, despite carriers irritation at providing it: For landline companies, dial-up service uses a heavily tariffed voice phone line that occupies a circuit, and just means more copper that they have to service. Carriers would rather have you switch to DSL or fiber. The logic of fiber makes sense--triple play or more services through one new pipe increasing annual revenue per user (ARPU)--but DSL's logic may be less explicable. It's the same copper used for dial up or DSL, but the phone company can sell you more services over DSL, and it takes you off a tariffed service and onto an information service that's not regulated. (AT&T is subject to certain provisions due to their merger on their DSL and data services, but those sunset in a few years.)
The upside of dial-up for carriers is that the margins are pretty high, as the cost of providing dial-up service is a fraction of what it was years ago. I have heard that it's as low as a few dollars a month in actual costs.
AT&T announced that starting Dec. 1, it's raising the price of all its dial-up Internet service: $9.99 per month plans go to $15.95, $15.95 to $22.95, and new service is $22.95 per month. EarthLink, which has told me what a cash cow dial-up is, charges $9.95 for three months, then $21.95 per month, or $14.95 per month with a 1-year contract, plus a $30 Amazon gift certificate. Juno and others charge as little as $10 to $15 per month, typically with fewer hosting services or other limits, none of which are particularly relevant in the era of Google GMail. AOL charges $9.95 for unlimited dial-up, and includes 5 GB of storage from its Xdrive subsidiary.
AT&T knows better than anyone who it has by the bollocks. It's jacking up prices knowing that there's a set of people who need Internet access who can't qualify for DSL, and they'll simply either extract more money for those people, or they'll flee to other providers who charge less and that will reduce AT&T's management and billing burden, and they might come out even there. They'll also pick up reluctant DSL convertees, who will sign up for the hard-to-find $10/month DSL package that's faster than dial-up, or a higher-speed offering.
In any case, AT&T comes out ahead: either more profit from a service that's cheaper to provide; fewer customers for a service they'd rather not offer; or more broadband customers, which increases their take while reducing their network overhead.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 3:22 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Home | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff said in an interview earlier this week that EarthLink is still open to building Wi-Fi networks across cities: What he wants, he told me Wednesday, is to get the right stakeholders in city-wide Wi-Fi to sit down and talk strategy. EarthLink's two-year-old Wi-Fi strategy, now effectively repudiated, was to go it alone. No longer. "The conversation can't begin with, 'You put up all the money.'" he said.
I hadn't spoken to Huff before, and he was very on message about this topic; it's tricky for the heads of publicly held firms these days to be frank, because anything new they disclose can be seen as material and affect filings, stock price, and so forth. Still, I was impressed by the intensity of his interest in charting a plan to make the municipal networking idea work, and his honesty in stating that EarthLink doesn't know if there's a way to make it work.
Huff stated in no uncertain terms that EarthLink hasn't closed the door on future networks. But he wants buy-in. "I think there are a lot of constituencies out there that have a reason to see Wi-Fi networks exist. And I'm one of those constituents. I'm absolutely a proponent of doing them," Huff said. Huff wouldn't comment on the remaining staff size in their municipal division following layoff announcments, which included the termination of Don Berryman, that division's head.
While Huff wouldn't discuss specific firms or strategies--he noted that what has "really hurt Wi-fi is that so much of the debate has been in the media"--he did say generally that a number of parties could be involved. "I'm getting to the people I believe would like to see Wi-Fi networks exist, and having a rational thoughtful conversation with them how we, we as a group of people who would like to see this happen, and how to make it happen."
In an analyst call last week, Huff noted that could include hardware makers, WiMax providers, municipalities, and chip makers. The EarthLink chief said that the company needed to find out "How many are interested in it, and interested in it enough to make commitments around it." Likewise, EarthLink would bring customers to other Wi-Fi networks that were built.
On the WiMax front, Huff wouldn't confirm or deny speaking with Sprint Nextel or Clearwire, but he did make clear that WiMax providers have a lot to gain from Wi-Fi, which I'd have to agree with. "The WiMax providers will never say publicly that there's a place for Wi-Fi; it's almost a religious thing," Huff said.
But Huff started building a WiMax network in Las Vegas while at his previous company, Mpower, and he said that led him to understand how Wi-Fi could help balance network load with a WiMax system. "Wi-Fi can't do a lot of the things that WiMax does, but the flip side of the story is that Wi-Fi in very confined areas can put a lot of bandwidth in a very targeted area," he said. (I've long argued that the Wi-Fi edge, which can deliver 20 Mbps in G or 50 to 100 Mbps in N over the local network could have a real potential beyond the 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps speeds typically provided across a metro-scale network when dealing with caching and media delivery.)
One of the items on the table for discussions with municipalities is working to shape cities' expectations of what a network buildout would look like. I always thought it was rather restrictive to require service providers to offer 95 percent coverage, given that cities have areas in which coverage makes no sense, in which broadband penetration is complete--nearly everyone who wants access has broadband--or where there's no audience for service.
"Should we really be spending the money to have picocells covering municipal parks? Is that the right way to do it to begin with? Or should we be focusing our capital dollars where people are -- where there are going to be the densest number of users?" Huff asked.
"We were providing coverage to cattle. It didn't make good business sense," Huff said. Those expectations, of course, were encoded in requests for proposals (RFPs), and service providers like EarthLink accepted them. That in turn prevented organic growth and may have led to the current crisis in which cost structure overwhelmed the true potential of network revenue.
Huff didn't suggest redlining--the old practice in which minorities were steered to de facto ghettoes or districts when purchasing houses. Almost the reverse. "EarthLink's model is not to cherrypick the highest-income areas. We want to get this to people who aren't necessarily looking to spend $100 to $150 per month for a voice, video, data combination," he said. Huff said EarthLink has always seen the municipal Wi-Fi customer as a $20 per month customer, the rough price they set for Wi-Fi in their markets.
A fundamental problem for EarthLink now, one that Huff alluded to in last week's analyst call and spoke about in our interview, is the cost of acquiring new customers. EarthLink's long-term customers have a good staying power, but customers they spend a lot to acquire also tend to churn faster, making them highly unprofitable. Huff seemed to make the point that EarthLink needs a way to bring on board many customers cheaply, which implies partnerships with firms that have existing customer bases that those firms can inexpensively provide information to.
I had heard and see the statistics that the U.S. dial-up market, while declining is also maturing--that it's likely we'll hit a stable point at which the people who cannot obtain faster service or aren't interested in broadband will remain a relatively constant pool. Huff said there is an inflection point.
"We look at our customer base, we've got a lot of customers who have been with us multiple years. The churn that you see are really people who are just coming into the category, who quickly roll out of the category. Which drove a lot of our restructuring," he said. Most importantly, though, "It's not a growth business, and it shrinks a little bit every year, but it generates huge amounts of cash."
Huff said that the problems facing EarthLink in the municipal market aren't unique. "Anybody who things this is an EarthLink issue is missing the point completely...If it were an EarthLink issue, there would be people lined up to be doing this. There would already be models just rocking."
And he's right: None of Huff's competitors are out there knocking on the doors of networks that are in abeyance in San Francisco and elsewhere. Many of those firms are walking away from networks themselves. "There's plenty of liquidity to invest money on things that will provide a return," he said. "The old model of Wi-Fi was not one of those things that would provide a return. People can vilify the company, but to me that's just a simplistic notion."
Fundamentally, Huff sees the restructuring effort as a way to bring EarthLink back to its roots, which was "bringing the power of the Web to everyone, not just those that could afford it. That was the principle that EarthLink was founded on. The municipal initiative was very supporting of that idea. And it's still a relevant idea. But it can't be an idea that gets funded on the back of shareholders that don't get a return."
What Huff needs to do now is re-inspire a certainly demoralized, and depleted workforce at EarthLink; convince financial markets that the firm has a way to increase revenues across all lines of business; and find the right stakeholders to make existing commitments to muni-Fi work while sorting out a new model.
If EarthLink walks away from all new municipal Wi-Fi networks, they're also walking away from the only pipe they could own outright.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 4:21 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Financial, Future, Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
Clearwire and Sprint Nextel agreed to allow roaming on their underway mobile WiMax networks: It's a huge shot in the arm for mobile WiMax, as neither of the two firms have enough geographic licenses to allow allow full national coverage. Sprint Nextel planned to back up its WiMax network with its 3G EVDO coverage; Clearwire had no such plan, as it has no other spectrum or network holdings. The deal allows Clearwire to roam onto Sprint's 3G network, which is a boon for them. Both firms can avoid patchy networks now that would make business travelers and companies with national footprints less likely to sign up.
Now, the reason I pose the question as to whether municipal Wi-Fi networks could suffer as a result is that mobile WiMax is a superior technology to Wi-Fi for large-scale mobility and indoor coverage. Yes, this is a Wi-Fi-oriented site. Yes, I have spent much of the last six years writing largely about Wi-Fi. Yes, there are hundred of city-wide Wi-Fi networks in planning stages or being built.
And, true, mobile WiMax in a new, unproven technology with a lot of promise that has to demonstrate its effectiveness in the real world. Truly mobile adapters that fit in or are built into laptops, handhelds, and gadgets like cameras and gaming systems, have yet to come (although we should see laptop cards next year), and are critical for widescale adoption. (Intel has plans to embed Wi-Fi and mobile WiMax in a reference laptop design, of course.)
But there's no question that mobile WiMax is a fresh standard built for long-distance, mobile, outdoor use, and that doesn't use spectrum with tons of competing uses (Wi-Fi) or require support or interoperability with legacy technology (Wi-Fi, cell data). WiMax is the ideal technology for building city-wide wireless networks. It just has to prove itself, and the providers have to offer competitive pricing, too, when compared to those offered for metro-scale Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi hotspots, and cell data networks.
I've been saying for some time that Wi-Fi is a "best-worst" technology for metro-scale rollouts (it's the "best-best" for wireless LANs). It's the worst, because it's not designed to work in metro-scale environments, and accommodations for that involve decisions like having mesh nodes that blast the maximum allowable power out in every direction. Wi-Fi is well designed to cope with interference, but not in the complicated RF environments that already exist in every urban area in the developed world. It's a best effort technology, so that you can't guarantee results, because of interference, co-existence, and power limits.
Wi-Fi is the best, however, because it's here today, and well characterized. We know how Wi-Fi works. You can roll it out without licenses, it's flexible, and almost every laptop and an ever-increasing number of mobile devices sold today has a Wi-Fi adapter built in.
Municipalities considering today whether to write a request for proposals to encourage or authorize citywide Wi-Fi networks, especially with what appears to be a new requirement by service providers like MetroFi to sign up for multi-year contracts, may step back to think about WiMax. I've already been thinking that if you were starting today, the near-term availability of 802.11n and MIMO gear for metropolitan deployment--maybe 6 to 12 months away--should make you hesitate in finding a firm that's designing the network today.
Now you're saying, Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, WiMax will be controlled by two firms in this country, extending the oligopoly of the telecoms, wired and wireless, and that Wi-Fi can be deployed by anyone, at any time, whether a city, a non-profit, a neighborhood, or a large-scale service provider--or even a telecom. WiMax is totalitarian; Wi-Fi is socialist.
True. But there's a thin margin that Wi-Fi has over WiMax. Cost and availability of adapters will likely be an issue for as long as two years. Speed is another: Wi-Fi's boost into 802.11n should allow dramatically higher speeds, although large-scale networks need to figure out how to exploit this to their customer's advantage.
The final part of that margin is that Wi-Fi can be offered to cities for a fraction of the cost of cell data, like EVDO and HSDPA. Even with large-scale subscriptions, cities still pay close to $60 per month for cell data subscriptions per card or user, plus the initial cost of the adapter (from $0 to $100, typically). Wi-Fi-equipped laptops in a metro-scale network can hop on an office Wi-Fi network when a city worker is in the office, and then roam onto a secure city-wide network as needed. Because Wi-Fi works across all operating systems, there's no driver limitation as there is with specific support for 3G adapters.
If Clearwire and Sprint Nextel are smart--and Clearwire has already been bidding on city-wide networks--they'll be able to put together a package for municipalities that guts one of the primary financial legs for citywide Wi-Fi. In Seattle, with Clearwire's current proprietary, pre-WiMax gear, you can spend about $35 per month for 1.5 Mbps down and 256 Kbps. They provide a nomadic adapter; one of my colleagues carries the small AC-powered device with him so he can work from home or at his girlfriend's apartments.
With the right offer for municipalities, a city or town could avoid the whole issue about providing access, dealing with utility poles, coping with community groups and their privacy concerns, and waiting for the buildout. Instead, Sprint and Clearwire will just keep lighting up cities and knocking on their doors. (Oh, and Clearwire and Sprint already have voice integrated into their mobile WiMax plans, just by the way.)
EarthLink's reaction here will be critical. The new CEO said a few weeks ago that he'd have a decision in 30 to 60 days about the company's future direction. Some of us who follow the firm expect that the municipal network division could go into maintenance mode, continuing on active networks, and pulling out of undone proposals. This Clearwire/Sprint roaming decision could affect EarthLink's plans, by removing one of the potential underpinnings of their financial model.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:00 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Future, Municipal, WiMAX | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks