Mobile WiMAX to Succeed Where Muni WiFi Failed? 93
WiNot writes "WiMAX's supporters are positioning Mobile WiMAX as an alternative to municipal WiFi networks in the wake of recent cancellation or postponement of muni WiFi projects in Chicago and San Francisco. 'There's no business case for municipal WiFi ... With many municipal WiFi deployments in a holding pattern, it may be Sprint's Xohm WiMAX network will be up and running before muni WiFi can get its act together.' From what Ars saw during its Motorola-sponsored cruise on the Chicago River earlier this week, WiMAX has the potential to deliver the goods in terms of speed, latency, and reliability. If Sprint hits its goal of blanketing metropolitan areas with WiMAX in a timely fashion and prices the service attractively, the kind of expansive municipal WiFi networks once envisioned in Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco could go the way of Pets.com and Flooz."
Re:One problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Figure out how much muni WiFi would have cost, total. Then add up all the future private company bills for service. Yup. We're screwed. I've always said that the real cost is the TOTAL charge for every customer since the inception of service, added up. It's fun to figure out how much a taxpayer-paid nationalized internet would have cost, and then add up every wireless, cable, telephone and DSL bill since the beginning of private service. Ans: we've been massively overcharged.
Do we pay for roads like this? Airports? Harbors? Altho it's interesting to note that embedded GPS and cell systems have led to a pilot project for a state to charge your car per mile driven. So we'll get it both coming and going, first taxes and bonds, then a usage charge.
The ultimate question is: where is the money going? Who's making billions unfettered by regulation?
Wait... what??? (Score:2)
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The USA is not a free market. It is a corporatocracy. Try to setup your own ISP and you'll soon find out from who's pockets the city officials peer.
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Look at the OPEL WiMax network proposed for providing broadband to rural areas of Australia. Wholesale access is mandated by the government, and hence prices will stay low due to practically unlimited equal competition.
Optus are building the network under this presupposition, with the objective of offering decent broadband to areas not economically feasible to be covered by ADSL2+ networks - not
Doubt it. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Where can I buy a WiMAX wireless adapter? Hint: AFAICS, you can't. Do a search on Pricewatch or Froogle, or even go to Sprint's Web page. OTOH, every laptop being produced today comes with support for 802.11a, b, g, and/or n.
2) WiMAX uses licensed spectrum. Cities looking to provide WiMAX service need an FCC license to do anything.
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Root Cause Found. (Score:2)
WiMAX uses licensed spectrum. Cities looking to provide WiMAX service need an FCC license to do anything.
The spectrum must be liberated [slashdot.org] or the internet will be owned.
OT: sig (Score:2)
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Re:Doubt it. (Score:4, Informative)
19 cities by April 2008? Bullshit. (Score:2)
Xohm currently plans to deploy WiMax to Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC in 2007, but commercial service [xohm.com] won't be available to customers until April 2008 at the earliest.
Service in other cities won't be commercially available until the end of 2008 at the earliest.
And that's if they can even live up to their press releases. Cellular providers are much better at announcing new services than delivering them.
-DaveU
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This is not an endorsement of a brand or anything, just the quickest link I could find. This would shift some of the burden to the townsfolk, but maybe the city could provide rebates to people within certain neighborhoods to have these installed?
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I once got involved with a group of people who wanted to deploy a system like that; basically a mesh network of wireless nodes. There was a linux distribution around that turned a computer with a wifi card into a mesh node, doing all sorts of neat intelligent routing. You could have multiple uplinks in the mesh at various points an
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The municipal WiFi players don't have spectrum, but they do have mounting locations and (in some cases) backhaul. Not trivial assets when contemplating a deployment.
Two problems just recently addressed (Score:1)
Please see today's article in CNN Money:
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0307789.htm [cnn.com]
Quoting from article: "The MiMAX USB is a ground-breaking product that will enable end-users to connect to virtually every Mobile WiMAX network
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The two popular USB WiMAX dongles are the ones by Airspan
http://www.airspan.com/products_wimax_custprem_mimax.aspx [airspan.com]
and Samsung
http://www.samsung.com/us/aboutsamsung/news/newsRead.do?newstype=productnews&newsctgry=consumerproduct&news_seq=3584 [samsung.com]
Many of the silicon vendors and makers of filters and amplifiers at the show today
don't really expect to see much happening with WiMAX in high volumes for another year or so.
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WiMAX can use unlicensed spectrum (Score:2)
I'd expect the commercial WiMAX services to use licensed spectrum, but that doesn't stop someone setting up their own WiMAX network if they can find suitable hardware
WiMax = Cellular 4G broadband (Score:2)
WiMax isn't the next generation of WiFi. It's the next generation of cellular broadband. In other words, the WiMax service that Sprint / Xohm has announced is an upgrade to their existing EVDO network. You'll be able to buy adapters for it when the service starts rolling out. Until them, buying adapters that don't work with any existing providers would be pointl
Flooz? (Score:3, Funny)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Flooz.com was a venture based in New York City that went online in February 1999. Their plan was to introduce a currency unique to the Internet, somewhat similar in concept to airline frequent flier miles or even the old grocery store stamp books. (The name "flooz" was supposedly based on an ancient Persian slang term for money.) As Internet users accumulated "flooz" credits, often given as a promotional bonus along with an online purchase or else purchased directly to create a kind of Internet gift card, they could later be redeemed for real merchandise at a variety of participating online merchants.
Flooz.com was started by former iVillage co-founder Ted Levitan, and also notably used Whoopi Goldberg in a series of TV commercials before the company collapsed, announcing their closing on August 26, 2001.
Upon closing, all unused flooz credits became worthless. Over its history, flooz.com reportedly went through between $35 to $50 million in venture capital money.
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Flooz.com was started by former iVillage co-founder Ted Levitan, and also notably used Whoopi Goldberg in a series of TV commercials before the company collapsed, announcing their closing on August 26, 2001. Upon closing, all unused flooz credits became worthless. Over its history, flooz.com reportedly went through between $35 to $50 million in venture capital money.
Someone should add "Since the flooz to dollars conversion was 1-0$, this was the day that the internet stock market plunged to its lowest level in years. It still has yet to rebound."
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Flooz Rocked! I got Flooz Free (Score:2)
Thanks Flooz and the bubble!
Licensed vs. unlicensed (Score:5, Informative)
Until the FCC is purged of Bush loyalists (Score:1)
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Since when is 3.8GHz one of the unlicensed bands?
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Next (Score:3, Funny)
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Couldn't the cities just deploy the Wimax? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Couldn't the cities just deploy the Wimax? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cost (Score:2)
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Plus the N800 is going to rock when I can hit wireless anywhere within the city limits.
Limitations (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a chance... (Score:4, Funny)
Not a chance of it being priced attractively if Sprint is involved
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Re:Not a chance... Actually Sprint is cheaper than (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, I'd love it to be free, but you really can't take Sprint to task for having expensive data service...
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Where are those prices ? (Score:1)
Two different goals... (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC, the goal of the municipal wi-fi deployments was usually to provide free Internet access to people working in and passing through downtown areas. This idea was loudly and vigorously shouted down by the organizations that provide for-pay Internet access. The roadblocks to the municipal projects were not technical; they were political.
It seems a bit disingenuous to compare a free-to-the-end-user project* (municipal wi-fi) with a fee-paid-by-the-end-user project (wi-max service).
* Yes, municipal services are paid for with taxes. However, there remains a distinction between this and paying directly for a specific service: think of driving on a typical interstate vice driving on a toll road.
WiMax and WiFi can be complementary systems (Score:2, Informative)
Wimax World (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been intrigued by Eric Schmidt's comment at the keynote introduction of the iPhone. "Wimax is coming," he said, without elaborating. Googling that phrase shows that almost no journalists have considered it an important remark, even though in the next breath he coined the term "applegoog" to describe how closely Google would be collaborating with Apple. "To merge without merging," as he put it. Later, Google announced its 700MHz interests, announced a collaboration with Sprint, which has announced its partnership with Clearwire (the two big Wimax telcos) and journalists still aren't paying attention.
So, yeah, Wimax could become the next munifi. It could also turn into serious headaches for AT&T, Verizon, and any company without a Wimax investment.
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Everyone Forgets... (Score:4, Informative)
For a failure, Sprint tried long range microwave broadband several years ago. They were going to add it to their ION service offering, but when ION got killed, so did the microwave broadband project. Sprint isn't known for their quality of support either. Having them go back into this business is a scary prospect.
Who says municipal wifi failed? A couple big cities that do not make up a huge percentage of land area or population of the US failed at it, and that makes the news. What doesn't make the news are the successes of nonprofit municipal partnerships such as Lawrence Freenet [lawrencefreenet.org]. I'm a happy subscriber to my municipal wifi service, and I have excellent coverage everywhere in a city of 100,000 people. Municipal wifi has not failed, but many have failed to manage it.
What about HSDPA? (Score:4, Informative)
I think WiFi is better suited towards local networking just as Bluetooth is useful to eliminate the need for wires, I don't see how WiMax can make that much of an impact unless they use an incredibly competitive pricing scheme...
Or EVDO... (Score:2)
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-DaveU
"No business case [for municipal WiFi]..." (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that there is no business case for public parks, either.
Not everything has to be about turning a profit for someone.
-- Terry
Re:"No business case [for municipal WiFi]..." (Score:5, Funny)
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Some two bit Scottish author [wikipedia.org].
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How do they increase their power and perks? Most local politicians, at least where I've seen, are thoroughly "in bed" with local housing and commercial real estate developers. Build and keep pretty parks, sell more houses. Grow the population, get more stores.
More population and more stores all bring in more tax revenue. A
Minneapolis (Score:1, Informative)
Intel? (Score:2)
This won't work either, for the same & more (Score:2)
MuniWiFi was a bad idea: WiFi in the 802.11b/g format has cell sizes that are limited because of the channel allocation. It has lousy propagation characteristics. Add that to terrible security, and interference problems with other devices.
Then-- find a model that makes sense to fund all of this and get it deployed in such a way that it has real coverage, especially in sparse and highly dense areas. There are none.
And only the chipset makers (Intel, stop it before you lose what little credibility you
Houston rocks (Score:2)
This is all about the Benjamins (Score:1)
WiFi is a lot cheaper and they get close to zilch revenue stream if people use it.
They just want to sell hardware.
Gagh. (Score:2)
Verizon is the only other player in the game now (Score:2)
-DaveU
Advantages over Spread Spectrum? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum [wikipedia.org]
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Muni WiFi was unrealistic. (Score:2)
It's not as simple as plugging in a router at home and shoving in a CAT5 cable from your ADSL or Cable 'modem'. A muni-wifi network needs to find power and handle the data back-haul (though a portion of the data can be bounced over the same wifi network)
The WiMAX Snowjob (Score:1)
Question for Wimax Experts (Score:1)
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Meanwhile, in other news .... (Score:2)
Private networks, or networks with a significant private involvement need some source of income. In order to attract paying customers, they need to provide some compelling features or performance that existing technology does not to justify their fees. Purely public networks need political support for their financing and operations costs. Municipalities that have sold such networks to their ta