municipal wireless

Mesh WiFi coverage depends on what you mean by coverage

7 July 2011 by Steve Blum
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WiFi is great as the last link between the network and the user. It’s high enough bandwidth that it’s not a bottleneck, people know to look for it and the available hardware and clients are well advanced. Consumers will pay for casual access, but in that case they expect performance. They love free WiFi and will put up with a surprising amount of hassle to access it. Companies like Meraki have made it very cheap and easy to get a “drinking fountain”, amenity grade WiFi service up and running, on a paid or free basis.… More

Live from CES, 8 January 2009

Last to first, real time tweets from Las Vegas…

  • WirelessHD press conference. Certification ready. 60GHz standard to link devices inside the same room to HDMI standards.

  • Clear thinker: Paul Liao, CTO Panasonic. Uses Maslow’s hierarchy to rate & rank tech features.
  • Clear, though, that there’s still a battle to be fought over how to split up content and application revenue in the wireless world.
  • Recognition that consumers will have lots of devices, but don’t want to pay lots of money to connect them all.
… More

Redefining municipal wireless

Municipal wireless was declared dead at the Wireless Communications Association’s recent symposium in San Jose, but the picture that emerged from three days of discussion, debate and presentations at the European Wireless and Digital Cities Congress in Barcelona this week was more comprehensive and nuanced. And optimistic.

The difference lies how you define municipal wireless. Older, more familiar models are certainly dead. No one expects a private company to invest in building a city-wide WiFi network to provide public Internet access, whether free or for a price.… More

A brief postmortem on the wireless Internet utility

Nearly all of the city-scale, mainly WiFi-based wireless ISPs of the past three years are dead. Some, like Philadelphia, lumber on as zombie ventures. A few small town systems will continue to operate as long as the social and political consensus supports the subsidy required. And there are a couple of big city projects that haven’t burned through their initial operating capital yet.

But the rest are dead. The disease that killed them was cash flow hemorrhage, brought on by virulent churn.… More