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Comdex
wasn't any thrill this year: call it the demi-Comdex, the mini-me Comdex. But
one meeting made the entire trip almost worthwhile. I spoke to a couple of guys
who are doing a fixed-point wireless ISP. The concept isn't new, but their
timing may be perfect.
And
these guys, who are from a company called Slice Networks in Nebraska, may
actually be ahead of a very big development: last week Intel, IBM and AT&T
endorsed their concept with a new company called Cometa Networks that will roll
out a new nationwide wireless network.
What is
so new about it? Well, as I said, fixed-point wireless has been around a while.
Metricom is perhaps the most notable example of a company who tried to pull it
off but failed, exiting the stage several hundred of millions in the hole. The
new take on wireless tries to do something different:
First
off, these approaches from Slice and Cometa are making use of existing
telecommunications infrastructure. The biggest challenge for Metricom was
getting access to towers to build out their network. Granted, their towers
weren't anything like the cellular industry needed, but you still have to put
your antennas around the countryside and that takes people on the ground and
lawyers ready to be deployed at a moments' notice. So if you can leverage
existing points of presence that are already wired to the Internet and just add
the radio gear, you are a leg up and several months' or years' ahead of the
game. Of course, these points have to be near where your customers need the
radio coverage, too.
Second,
we aren't talking about needing any new gear on the client side either. Where
Metricom fell short was in using custom radio receivers for each client. These
new approaches make use of the most common wireless adapters out there -- the
802.11b wireless network standard. And what is nice about this standard is that
the interoperability wars have already been fought and won and it pretty much
doesn’t matter whose gear you use: everything (usually) works together.
What
makes the 802.11b (also known as WiFi) play more compelling is that Intel,
Apple, IBM, Toshiba, and Dell are all planning (or doing it already) on
incorporating wireless networking clients in their laptops, so there is
literally nothing that users have to do to take advantage of this. Microsoft is
also helping matters by making Windows XP the most wireless-friendly operating
system out there. (Some would argue that XP is too friendly, making it easier
for users to tap into wireless networks that they shouldn't be using, but I
won't take that up here.)
Finally,
you want to leverage the existing billing and customer support infrastructure
of a standard ISP or phone company to make the whole ball of wax easier. This
is what the Slice Networks guys are doing, and what some other forward-thinking
ISPs are planning in this area, and why AT&T is part of the Cometa play.
One of the reasons that DSL has been such a boondoggle has been ginning up the
billing apparatus to keep track of large numbers of people spending small sums
of money on a monthly basis: the phone companies are very, very good at this,
and only some ISPs are just now getting the hang of it.
Okay,
so what's the big deal? The added wrinkle to what Slice and the bigger players
are doing in fixed-point wireless is to extend the range of the 802.11b radios.
Typically, these devices only operate within a few hundred feet of their access
points, and that is being generous. The catch is being able to boost the signal
strength to cover miles of territory, so that fewer antennas and access points
are needed. In addition to boosting the signals, you need additional
electronics to ensure that more than a few users can connect and make use of
the access points that were originally designed to just support small
workgroups. Fortunately, the technology to make this all happen is now readily
available, and is coming into wider deployment. It is an exciting time. My
colleague Dave Molta from my former alma mater Network Computing recently wrote
a couple of articles about these technologies:
http://www.nwc.com/1324/1324f2.html (wireless bridging)
http://www.nwc.com/1324/1324f1.html
(point to point wireless)
So what
we have here is a transformation taking place. The original idea with 802.11
networks was to provide mobility, as users roamed around their campuses with
their laptops but were able to stay connected and get their work done. The new
wide-ranging 802.11 application is to provide connectivity still, but to users
who aren't moving around necessarily: they just are either too cheap, or too
lazy to deal with getting higher-speed connections and still want to use the
same gear but from a stationary spot, located inconveniently far away from any
broadband supplier. Even though the growth in cable modems has been tremendous
over the past 18 months, and DSL is still gaining converts despite the
financial debacles of the major suppliers, there are still many locations
around the country that will never be wired for broadband access. The new
fixed-point wireless changes that equation substantially.
The
guys I met with from Slice told me that they were profitable from the first
month forward with their setup: the cost of goods to extend their existing
points of presence into the wireless arena were measured in just a couple of
thousand dollars, and it doesn't take many customers to pay back that
investment quickly. Granted, Cometa has a bigger nut to crack, but I think both
are on to something. Maybe this time fixed-point wireless will be a hit.
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Entire contents copyright 2002 by David Strom, Inc.
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