I sat in on the investor call for Cometa.. Cometa aims to deploy 20k access points in the United States by sometime in 2004. They used a metric of having an access point within 5 minutes of anyone in the United States (it was a little more complicated, but that was the gist). They will not offer services to individuals, but will resell the network to ISPs and others who will drive usage to it. In otherwords they will be a wholesaler of access with others determining how to market, bill, etc. for the usage.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Julian Bond Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 12:56 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [BAWUG] What is Cometa Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >My reading of Cometa's announcement is that they are not, in fact, building >a network, but instead offering infrastructure building services to large >venues and organizations. They'll build a unified authentication back end, >but I expect they'll go the vendor-neutral route of allowing aggregators and >roaming partners to use the network on a revenue-splitting basis. There's not really enough information to know so we're all reading between the lines. And Cometa may not know themselves. Interesting that I leapt to the conclusion that it was a model like BT Openzone, T-Mobile or Megabeam. Perhaps a better analogy is BT Openworld's wholesale ADSL. A small ISP can resell BTO's raw broadband, add value and own the customer but BTO still own the physical line and DSLAMs. But that doesn't directly translate either. As I try and think about your comments, whatever it is Cometa are building turns to sand in my fingers. This could be like teaming a broadband provider, with Boingo, with Colubris, with Smart City. But it actually begins to feel more like three companies who are vaguely in the market uniting under one brand name in order to do marketing. AT&T sell bandwidth, IBM sell consultancy and Intel want to sell WiFi kit and that's all there is. That sounds much too like Sun, Cisco, Oracle selling a dotcom startup pack (remember that??!!). -- Julian Bond Email&MSM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ CV/Resume: http://www.voidstar.com/cv/ M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
