Agreed. But I question the reasons, because there are more than one factor leading their interest. Some of it is vendor pressure. Some of it Egos sore from past failed attempts. For example, the big Cable Cos were major investors in Clearwire (and maybe other WImax alliances), and had to pull out without a ROI. Human phychy typical responses are either 1) that didn't wotk, forget that market, or 2) I'll show them (the world), we'll just do it ourselves and be in control of our investment, or 3) Of you fall off the horse, get back on and try a again, except more out of pride than good judgement. Or maybe its just fear of a competitor being one up?.Verizon/ATT has the bundle and we dont, shouldn't we be competing with the Jones? Or, some guy working from his basement can do this, surely we should be able to.... Lets explore it. I'd find it hard to believe that the primary justification would be, "we crunched the numbers and did some preliminary engineering, and this is one super exicting big profit venture." Heck, I honestly can say, if I were the President of Time Warner or Comcast, and some bozo pitched the the board to start a 10,000 node wifi play, I'd probably fire them on the spot, on the basis that they were likely either blind or insane, and maybe throw in a few cheap shots like, "Remember Cometa, Remember Clearwire, Remember Earthlink". Maybe even address the CAble Co board with, "Lets not forget who we are, we are the best darn Cable Co in the country, lets keep it that way, no reason to tarnish our name with Wifi failures.". Unless, they pulled an "infinity", and launched a different brand name for the wifi project. Maybe its partially an attitude of "what do we have to loose"? IF the project fails, one up side is we destroyed teh RF environment to reduce WISP's effectiveness, a disruptive defensive measure masked as a legit project for public good. Maybe its boredom? We got the money, why not try something new?
The other thing is they'll reaslize that its hard to deploy in public spots with the game plan that "this is for Comcast subscribers". The venues will want Wifi for all patrons, not just patrons of Comcast. Sure it could be with a fee for everyone else, but again, the trend now adays is free wifi, and that is what public venues will want. Venues wont want the comcast wifi to interfere with their own. These are generally the flaws that The big Cos dont recognize early on. Just becaues there is an intent to dbuy and deploy 10,000 nodes doesn;t mean one can find 10,000 useful places to install them, where they are allowed to install them. Maybe, I'm not the insightful one, but personally, I feel Comcast and TimeWarner would be much better off concentrating on expanding Cable to the remainign 24% of unserved rural Americans, than messin around with wifi. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Hammett To: WISPA General List Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 3:41 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Ericsson is buying BelAir, betting on Wi-Fi Agreed. The technology is different, the model is different, the reasons are different. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com On 1/31/2012 2:13 PM, Brian Webster wrote: Tom, I have sat in on planning these networks with Time Warner and Comcast. The way they are building these versions they will work for their purposes. Trust me I have built a couple of large scale muni networks J In regards to the mounting issues, so long as they have above ground outside plant life will be good for them. These nodes mount on the suspended messenger wire, not the poles. That means they can just attach them to their existing lines. I'm not saying that it will be easy but it's much easier than someone else trying to build given the fact that they already occupy the space on said poles. They are also planning to ink deals with local businesses to mount nodes when necessary. Since they will be wiring every node to their network for backhaul, there is no requirement for any wireless meshing, just connectivity to the client device. They do not necessarily plan to have a contiguous network market wide, just where there are likely to be high concentrations of users. This also not meant to be a network that will hand off connections from node to node at highway speeds. They are assuming a relatively stationary user of the system. This whole design philosophy is quite different from the muni Wi-Fi networks most of us think about. The real reason they are building these is to keep customer churn down by offering existing broadband and video customers a free mobility component in areas they are likely to need it. I would expect they will also later ink some roaming deals will cellular carriers but that is not on their initial radar as of now. They will be using nodes that have smart channel selection capability which will pick the quietest channel. In some cases there are also plans to include the 5 gig spectrum as consumer devices are now showing up on the market capable of using both bands. I would not be so quick to dismiss this iteration of outdoor Wi-Fi. It's coming; they have combined an extra 3.5 billion dollars they just received from selling spectrum to Verizon. They are hiring plenty of skill to build this properly and/or fix issues that arise. It's change and it's coming. There is enough at stake to have to make this work. Cellular needs a successful deployment strategy for outdoor Wi-Fi to work as well for their offload needs. The manufacturers have a lot of radios they want to sell so they have to make it work now. Outdoor Wi-Fi will not go away now, you can take that bet to the bank. You may not like or want that to happen but it's going to just the same. When people say it can't happen I just remind myself of how many times I have said that over my wireless career and how many times I was proven wrong. Heck just a few months ago people were complaining that the spectral mask in TVWS was not going to allow for any reasonable speed offerings, yet now all of the sudden we have manufacturers coming up with designs that work. Everything changes and they change faster when more money is at stake. Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: Tom DeReggi [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 11:46 AM To: [email protected]; WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Ericsson is buying BelAir, betting on Wi-Fi Yes, a typical tactic for the sole purpose to destroy the RF environment, and scare high ARPU businesses and investors from trusting third party unlicensed wireless providers solutions. Its all about fear factor. But Just like any other large scale MUNI network, it wont work, and will be to costly to maintain, and the bad press will incourage the Cable Cos to shut down the networks instead of continueing to damage their brand's reputation as a quality high speed resildential provider. They can plan to deploy 10,000 nodes, but planning has no value if there is no where to put/mount them. Maybe they could mount them inside people's homes :-) Surely, they aren't going to work mounted on their tiny green 2ft pedestals on every corner. Surely, they aren't going to pay landlords $200/month each to mount on 10,000 commercial building roofs. What they more likely would do is go put in Wifi access points into the communities that they do not want to dig up the streets and bring cable to, that the City/states are trying to force them to do with cable, leveraging the franchise agreement renegotiations. A attitude like, get off my back, why spend $5000 to dig, when I can spend $200 on an access point and pretend we serve everyone, and make it a play on all the lobbying WISPs did to say, "wireless is good enough" for WISPs, so it must also be good enough for Cable Cos. I could easilly see Comcast applying for USF, and using Wireless combined with Cable. >Time Warner is planning I believe around 10,000 node in the LA market this year and after they get that market proven, they plan on rolling out nationwide in their markets Except the market wont be proven successful. Funny how history repeats itself. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: Brian Webster To: 'WISPA General List' ; [email protected] Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 4:16 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Ericsson is buying BelAir, betting on Wi-Fi It's not just the cellular industry. Comcast is deploying 18,000 outdoor wi-fi nodes this year and giving that service for free to their customers to keep them happy in a mobile environment and reduce churn. Time Warner is planning I believe around 10,000 node in the LA market this year and after they get that market proven, they plan on rolling out nationwide in their markets. The networks are specifically being designed for tablets and wi-fi enabled phones in a nomadic but not seamless mobile environment. Being that the cable companies who sold spectrum to Verizon for 3.5 billion dollars, they are using some of that money for these deployments. For those in those metro markets, these carriers are planning both 2.4 and 5 GHz dual mode radios. Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jack Unger Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 12:00 PM To: "[email protected]" w; WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] Ericsson is buying BelAir, betting on Wi-Fi In a sure sign that the cellular industry is getting serious about Wi-Fi, telecom networking giant Ericsson is buying BelAir Networks, adding its high-performance outdoor hotspot technology to its portfolio, sources told GigaOM. The deal could signal a big shift in the mindset of the big wireless vendors, which have always favored their own specialized and expensive cellular technologies to meet growing mobile data demand rather than more generic but much cheaper Wi-Fi tech... <http://gigaom.com/broadband/ericsson-pursuing-wi-fi-with-belair-networks-buy/> -- Jack Unger - President, Ask-Wi.Com, Inc.Author (2003) - "Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks"Serving the WISP Community since 1993www.ask-wi.com 818-227-4220 [email protected] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! 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