Every old lady renewing or upgrading a cell phone from now on will be getting a 3G-4G phone. Demand on Cell cites will be enormous in another year or so. Without public WiFi taking the pressure off the cell companies’ antennas, it will be hard to make a voice call. Do people still do that?

I beg your pardon for the mischaracterization. More accurate would have been to say ‘the conclusions from your The White Paper’ here.

I have never proposed covering the entire city with Wi-Fi, i.e. municipal Wi-Fi. Too expensive for too little performance given the spectrum. I have always been more a proponent of a community based as opposed to a citywide Wi-Fi. What Wi-Fi is good at is high speed, short distance. Work with that if you want to create value.

I too believe in the value of debate, especially now when so much is up in the air in NYC, and nationally. Over the next days, we will be relaunching Wired Towns in part to enable that. We will have our structure and value proposition on the site, and from there we can really aggregate the opinion of all those who are invested in making public (not muni) Wi-Fi more available.

Once we get past that, would love to chat. We will then have a nice framework for debate.

I respectfully disagree.

White Space spectrum won’t make such a great difference anyway. It’s just another hyped up piece.

Furthermore, I don’t recall you receiving our White Paper, so you can’t and shouldn’t comment on it. What you may have read is the “Why it Won’t Fly” 11-pager on my blog. http://glassified.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/why-it-wont-fly-community-fiber-muni-wi-fi/

You should see the tables in our White Paper. Public Wi-Fi is underestimated at a cost, operational and deployment level. For example, to build a somewhat robust Wi-Fi infrastructure for New York City, it would cost approx. $1 Billion on an oversubscription ratio of 20:1, and $335M at an os ratio of 60:1… go figure.

I understand that I am not saying something popular, but the numbers speak for themselves. You may feel I am trying to kick your livelyhood, but that’s not my intention. However, if you can shoot holes in my businessmodels, please do so. I’ll be wiser for and because of it. If, at the end of the day, my model doesn’t work, I deserve to be put put of business. That’s how things go.

Do you deserve to be put out of business? No, I think you, Marshall Brown, deserves to be supported in your efforts to bring public/free/sponsored wireless connectivity. You truly have the passion that’s needed.

So, I am hereby offering you free and unconditional support. Send me a note, and let’s set up a time somewhere next week. It won’t hurt to spar a bit now and then, and if it makes sense, to follow up on my advise.

Take care

NSL

This was obvious to many an observer even in 2003.

The mentality that you needed to cover the whole city to offer viable public Wi-Fi led to mass disappointment and failure.

I have always advocated ‘building community wells’ over trying to provide everyone with indoor plumbing. Put Wi-Fi in the places where people naturally gather — main street, town squares, the village green, the commons.

If by public Wi-Fi being dead you mean the notion that an entire city must be covered with a Wi-Fi umbrella, then I agree. Wi-Fi is best thought of as a nomadic rather than a mobile experience. Understand first the limitations of the technology. These networks were built along the carrier model — Earthlink, Metrofi. Universal coverage was never possible nor economically desirable despite the feel good politics of it. If you just light up the libraries and schools, you have done a lot already.

I agree with Andy that ‘in rural America there will not be an issue,’ That’s where white space solutions will bloom and where I am starting.

While many people just hate his straight-up talk, I agree fully with him.

Neal

Good question. The Emperor of Wireless, Andrew Seybold, has a great piece related to your question. And while it is a bit dated, the information is still quite relevant. (http://www.andrewseybold.com/commentary.asp?ID=73).

In our wireless white paper, we covered the 700 MHz challenges and we explain why even technologies such as LTE will not be able to deliver on a double-digit Mbps promise. Heck, we explain why WiMAX isn’t the holy grail of broadband either.

Double-digit speeds on any “wide range” mobile network will be highly unlikely, even when the WISP will put a small number of users on each “cell”, but they will want to put make subs on the network, because they need to make money.

Once we build and operate our infrastructures, we plan to offer subscribers 1) mobile telephony (like you have now with your cellular/wireless provider), 2) mobile broadband (it could be a WiMAX kind of service or a LTE kind of service), and 3) City-wide/State-Wide/Nation-wide Broadband Wireless Access at 10 Mbps (basic) and 100 Mbps (premium).

However, the latter service is limited to where we build out. So, while you will be able to get our 100 Mbps BWA everywhere in the city and the suburbs, maybe even exburbs… and maybe even in some rural areas, there will be NO such grand service where we don’t have the infra. It is simple as that! We can’t promise you a service at a place where we didn’t freaking build the infrastructure for it. Thus double-digit speeds will most likely only be possible in a certain Fixed Mobile Convergence network. There is simply no technology that solves the speeds vs range problem. The government will and cannot release the spectrum for it. That would be insane. Thus, we will always have the trade-off of speed vs range. At least, I think as long as I’ll live… and I am (just) 38. ;)

Thus, for us as users we will be able to get the services we need, but because of the inherent limitations of our service providers, we will hop from one to the other. Thus, if we will be traveling in the train or with the car, we may be happy with our Mobile Broadband service at maybe 10 Mbps (if not just 5 or 2 Mbps). Of course, once you get in the “coverage” are of my company’s systems/networks/infrastructures, you will be able to hop/switch to the 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or whatever service you are paying for. But in order to be able to do this, you need to have the MAN, WAN and LAN infrastructure build, and also extend fiber to each base station. That will cost tens of billions. Our wireless access infrastructure will cost approximately $5 billion, and that is besides the fact (AND HUGE COSTS) of our 15,000 NEW miles of fiber (to extend to streets/buildings/homes/offices – FTTH/O).