Interesting discussion on the UW and UC Berkeley lists related to liberationtech on the FCC proposal for public WiFi.
YC Forwarded conversation Subject: [change] Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks ------------------------ From: *ashish makani* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM To: TIER <[email protected]>, change <[email protected]>, [email protected] Hi Folks Came across this interesting story http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-telecom-giants-take-sides-as-fcc-proposes-large-public-wifi-networks/2013/02/03/eb27d3e0-698b-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html Excerpt: "The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month. The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google<http://washpost.bloomberg.com/marketnews/stockdetail/?symbol=GOOG> ,Microsoft<http://washpost.bloomberg.com/marketnews/stockdetail/?symbol=MSFT> and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor." This proposal is in the US, but would be interesting to see, if developing countries with big user bases, could also use large scale public wi-fi n/ws instead of/in addition to, mobile telephony n/ws. Also, what about the relative costs of building a large scale public wifi n/w as opposed to a mobile telephony n/w, in a world where increasingly data dominates voice. cheers ashish _______________________________________________ change mailing list [email protected] http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change ---------- From: *Hisham Bedri* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 4:08 AM To: ashish makani <[email protected]> Cc: TIER <[email protected]>, [email protected], change < [email protected]> Thanks for sending this out! I heard about someone trying to implement the same thing in West Africa. Does anyone know the specifics (pros/cons) to large-scale wifi networks vs. cell-networks? Thanks, Hisham _______________________________________________ > TIER mailing list > Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu > [email protected] > https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier > > _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu [email protected] https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier ---------- From: *Yaw Anokwa* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:14 AM To: ashish makani <[email protected]> Cc: change <[email protected]> Independent of the regulatory challenges, even small scale community WiFi networks very hard to pull off. Shaddi (of TIER fame) wrote about this a few years back. He concludes, "I'm not saying mesh networks don't work ever...What I am saying is that unplanned wireless mesh networks never work at scale." Related: http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-access-and-wi-fi-always-so-terrible-at-large-tech-conferences > _______________________________________________ > change mailing list > [email protected] > http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change > _______________________________________________ change mailing list [email protected] http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change ---------- From: *Kurtis Heimerl* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:21 AM To: Yaw Anokwa <[email protected]> Cc: change <[email protected]> I don't think anyone's talking about mesh networks, are we? As far as wifi vs cell networks, that's a huge discussion. The biggest issues are ones of range and quality of service; cell networks are designed to go kilometers and provide basic guarantees for voice bandwidth. Wifi networks are not. However, given enough spare bandwidth (rough given the tragedy of commons) and in a dense urban situation, there's no particular reason you couldn't do all of your communications through one of these free networks. I'd be happy to field any more specific questions on the differences. _______________________________________________ change mailing list [email protected] http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change ---------- From: *Shaddi Hasan* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:41 AM To: Kurtis Heimerl <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, change < [email protected]> Kurtis beat me to the punch. Common architectures for mesh networks are very inefficient, but whether community WiFi is infeasible is an orthogonal discussion. My personal opinion is that you need someone whose money is at stake to make any network work, but I would love to be proven wrong. That said, this article isn't even talking about WiFi or community networks, and the coverage of this issue has confused the hell out of me because I don't think anyone is proposing free WiFi. The issue here is the FCC's desire to open up a bunch of spectrum in the 600MHz band to meet rising mobile data demands in the US. The 600MHz band is really nice because it has great propagation properties for going through buildings and foliage, making it desirable for doing wireless broadband, especially in rural areas. Think TV whitespaces, but this chunk of frequency is a contiguous 120MHz chunk. One one side, you have the FCC and Google/Microsoft/etc who want that band to be unlicensed (similar to the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands actual WiFi uses) in order to promote competition and increase access. On the other, you have incumbents and apparently the Republicans who want to auction off that band since the former want to own more spectrum for their 4G networks and the latter claim to want the revenue from the auction (at risk of being political on a public mailing list: I wonder if they'd still be opposed if this were cast as a tax). The incumbents in the US especially want more spectrum because they're about to have new entrants into the 4G LTE market such as Clearwire (or whoever buys them) since they own a crapload of spectrum and thus could potentially offer high speeds: http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/4/29/1007049-13357261824037905-Helix-Investment-Management_origin.png My take: it'd be a crime not to open up more unlicensed spectrum below 900MHz. It'd be a huge boost to the many Wireless ISPs in the US, and the equipment that would be produced for that band would be excellent for rural broadband. I expect that whatever this band gets used for, it will not be for free service, and it will probably have an architecture pretty similar to the cell network in urban areas and will use the standard tree-like distribution that rural WISPs use today. _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu [email protected] https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier ---------- From: *Pablo Paredes* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:56 AM To: Shaddi Hasan <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, change < [email protected]> My 2 cents... >From my past experience with smaller projects like this in the field in small municipalities in latin america, the biggest problem at the end is not the technology (whether it is wifi, lte, wimax on 600MHz white spaces, 700MHz, 2.4GHz, or not), it is the actual operation. These projects sound very nice in paper as it is simple to throw a model that shows enough capacity for everyone in the short term, with doable infrastructure. Nobody really throws numbers around actual operation and customer service. What is more difficult, even if those numbers are there, nobody really realizes the complexity to maintain such networks (again from a customer use perspective). I have seen beautiful infrastructure (fully financed) projects that die in quite a few years due to lack of training, customer focus and lack of a service oriented culture. I think it is possible to overcome this problem as long as there is a stronger emphasis on the service rather than the infrastructure. However this is a non trivial statement in practice. The devil is in the details (or operation). Potentially a PPP could help, but again, without a service focus (and prior experience), the risk of failure is not low. _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu [email protected] https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier Pablo Paredes [email protected] _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu [email protected] https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier ---------- From: *James Dailey* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:15 AM To: Kurtis Heimerl <[email protected]> Cc: change <[email protected]> Unlicensed spectrum is super important for innovation! Really the FCC is merely saying that a small portion of the spectrum (now owned by TV stations) should be allocated to the public domain - unlicensed (i.e. not sold at auction to be exclusively owned and controlled by a corporate entity). Mesh networks might be possible in that niche - but so could some other interesting and innovative ideas - tethered blimp networks anyone?. ;) Imagine what the world would be like if there was no such thing as an opensource license, and I think you understand why having some contextual space for different business models is important. I applaud the FCC for taking this step. I hope enough support lines up behind it. - James Dailey Seattle On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Kurtis Heimerl <[email protected]>wrote: -- James Dailey skype: jdailey _______________________________________________ change mailing list [email protected] http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change ---------- From: *James Forster* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:21 AM To: Pablo Paredes <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, change < [email protected]> I think Pablo has focused on the right area -- operations, staffing, responsibility, etc. Small networks are pretty easy, but big networks are not. My impression about the subject of the Washington Post article referenced below -- 'large public WiFi networks', is that many of these are being built now; not as community networks staffed by volunteers, but designed and built by 'professionals', funded by Google (for alternate broadband access), the carriers (for WiFi offload), sometimes by community development groups. -- Jim _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu [email protected] https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier
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