Russell Nelson writes:Perhaps I can provide a bit of enlightenment on this score, as I was at WJ Communications (a partner company -- we made the UNII radios for the product) during the BWIF days. There were at least two problems the work had that I was personally aware of (there may have been others):Jim Thompson writes:
Cisco purchased Clarity in Sept of 1998 for, what, $157M? They announced the EOL on November 12, 2001.
Lets call it 2 years.
How much Clarity gear did Cisco sell? What was the ROI on this investment?
Well, wait a second, Jim. Greg was saying that yes, sales were disappointing to Cisco and that's why they cancelled the product. You're saying that the equipment didn't work and that's why they cancelled the product. You're never going to convince Greg that the equipment didn't work by pointing to poor financial results. That's the evidence he's using to justify his conclusion. It ain't gonna go far in justifying your conclusion.
Perhaps sales were dissapointing because the equipment didn't work?
1] Cisco in those days was arrogant enough to bypass the IEEE, just as the Bluetooth SIG had done several years earlier, in both cases to their sorrow. The customers I spoke to preferred to wait for IEEE 802.16 so that they could have some confidence in upgradeability and multi-vendor compatibility.
2] The BWIF radios were rather expensive (we made them so I know), but they were just the tip of the iceberg. In order to make the system work, a WISP customer had to hang a $70,000 Cisco router off of the $500-$1000 radio, and then pay for expensive customer premises equipment and siting. If you get 100% uptake on your roughly 50 Mbps capacity [my recollection -- I don't have any docs on this any more] and you can sell it for $1K/year/Mbps, you get a revenue of $50K/year from a basestation. That puts a small WISP in the position of spending perhaps $100K to $150K to gain a revenue stream of $50K per year exposed to competition and requiring some support expenditures as well. The economics are much better for an 802.11-based solution.
Daniel M. Dobkin Enigmatics 1-408-314-2769 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
BAWUG: if this is still coming in as an HTML stream, I apologize (I can't find a menu selection to turn it off in my email program); you can just throw it away; oh well. --DMD
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