Matt,
Great find on the arcticle. However, I ask, does the press hurt or help
WISPs?
Is it saying, they should have deplyoed Fiber? Or should have left it up to
the professional local WISP, and stuck to governemt stuff? Or They need
better wireless gear than Wifi? Do WISPs win, if the industry looses the
investment dollars to the fiber telcos? So theWISPs win, not having
competitions? Or will more WISPs be brought in as partners with recognized
knowledge?
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Liotta" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:13 AM
Subject: [WISPA] The muni Wi-Fi poster child lied?
From Techdirt
http://news.techdirt.com/news/wireless/article/6717
Putting A Little Lipstick On Muni WiFi
Back in May, 2004, Municipal Wireless was still just on the drawing board,
but a few towns and cities were about to lead the charge into using WiFi
to meet their admirable goal of providing low-cost connectivity. At the
time, I wrote about Chaska, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis that was
launching their citywide network. I argued in Techdirt and in USA Today
that WiFi would be the wrong choice for Muni Wireless because of range
(it's a LAN technology) and interference issues, among others. My opinion
was contrasted by Bradley Mayer, the city IT Manager responsible for
spearheading Chaska.net, who was very optimistic about the planned
network. By October, we were both again quoted in a CNN.com article in
which I say: "I haven't seen a lot of what I would consider real successes
yet [with municipal wireless]. More and more cities are announcing they're
going to do [Muni WiFi], and I get concerned because I'm hearing more and
more rhetoric that isn't consistent with the underlying technology." Mr.
Mayer, in contrast, said, "So far, customers are happy with the city's
Wi-Fi start". Accepting what Mayer said as truth, myself and others had to
concede that smaller towns may prove us wrong on Muni WiFi. I actually
spoke with Mayer in late 2004 as part of some private research I was
conducting for a telco client, and he again portrayed the Chaska WiFi
network as a glowing example of how Muni WiFi works well.
Flash forward to the present, and imagine how frustrating it is, then, to
see Mr. Mayer admit, ex post facto, that Chaska's network was actually
quite a mess. Of course, the Tribune article claims that that is all in
the past, and now the network is great. Well, I'm sorry, but there is a
credibility gap to address now. We were told it was "great" 18 months ago,
but later we're told by the same person "It took about a year and a half
before we felt we really had a good handle on the network." And according
to Mayer's' boss, "The speed wasn't good, or they [subscribers] couldn't
get on [the network]. Sometimes customer service was a problem. It was
hard for us to staff up to meet peak times." There was an early 50% cost
over-run to deploy more APs, and there has been a subsequent full upgrade
to the next generation of Tropos gear. The city, not able to handle the
maintenance of the network, contracted Siemens to do the task, and also
has outsourced support. However good they claim things are now, it
certainly looks like it was a disaster until just recently. And those are
the real results from Chaska, a city that had all the advantages of
manageable size, pre-existing links to the Internet backbone, ownership of
the local power utility, low building height, and full utility pole
access. But now, we're to believe the current network is great because
they say so...again.
Mr. Mayer, who parlayed his Muni WiFi deployment experience in Chaska into
a better job as the WiFi deployment expert at Earthlink, is quoted in the
Trib as saying "there was a lot of pre-conceived notions that you could
just blast [Wi-Fi signals] through walls and trees and everything." It
might save a lot of money if Muni Broadband enthusiasts take a good hard
look at WiFi vs. other options before deployment, instead of forging ahead
on wishful thinking and pre-conceived notions.
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