WiFi and wireless

The BBC has an article asking what happened to public WiFi. The big WiFi projects that attracted so much attention in the U.S. five and six years ago (e.g. Philadelphia, San Francisco) failed miserably and were shut down or dramatically restructured. Some smaller municipal WiFi projects, like the one in St. Cloud, Florida, had some early rough spots but are still active. But local governments, by and large, found that free WiFi was expensive to support and often very lightly used.

AT&T has been having problems with its cellular data networks--both EDGE and 3G. I noticed that things were not working at all on the data side (phone calls were fine) on Monday and Tuesday, but since the release of the new iPhone last month, I've had chronic problems with pokey data access.

Using EVDO cellular data technology, you will be able to buy a Chrysler with built-in Internet access. The pricey feature includes everything you need to plug in a laptop and surf the 'net while traveling down the highway. You will have to have a cell tower within range, but the Chrysler option and what is likely to be many more competing systems, including after market add-ons, is likely to be popular with anyone who drives a lot.

AT&T, perhaps partly by accident, has probably created success story that is likely to become a business textbook case study classic. Its partnership with Apple has succeeded beyond the company's wildest dreams. Once a kind of also-ran in the cellular industry, customers are switching in droves to AT&T just to get an iPhone. And AT&T has wisely beefed up its network and is making massive investments to ensure its customers have a good signal in more places.

We already have too many people driving around with cellphones glued to their ears, not paying attention (clue: driving seven miles under the speed limit, wandering back and forth across the lane). Now Chrysler has announced they are building in support for WiFi in some of their automobiles. Great....now we'll have people driving while talking AND watching YouTube at the same time.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....

Clearwire has announced plans to operate its proposed national WiMax network as an open access system, and major players like Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner have apparently already agreed to become resellers on the network. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, as an enormous investment will be required to build the national infrastructure required to meet the promised goals. One of the backers of Clearwire is Sprint, which is losing cellular marketshare rapidly, and may regard Clearwire as its last chance to keep from being broken up and sold.

Every year about this time, I write about wireless. I'm at the beach, and have to use the local wireless service. It works great at 6 AM, when no one else is up, but once all the other people in the neighborhood start logging on, the service gets slower and slower. Wireless is a shared medium, like cable modem service. A wireless access node with, for example, 20 megabits of bandwidth, shares that bandwidth among all users.

Tempe, Arizona's foray into community and municipal wireless has not worked out as expected. Like many other communities that have tried the same thing and have also failed, Tempe tried to avoid spending any money. They simply granted an untested wireless firm access to city lightpoles and structures for wireless equipment. The private firm had to bear the entire cost of build out. The wireless system was also not seen as reliable as a wired system, and the wireless firm has not been able to attract many subscribers.

"Free wireless" is beginning to look a lot like "free lunch" -- it may not be possible. The City of Hartford, Connecticut embarked two years ago on an ambitious plan to provide free wireless service to large portions of the city. After two years and $800,000, there is little to show.

This article provides another example of the "no free lunch" principle as it applies to community wireless. Sprint is having trouble rolling out its WiMax service offering because of backhaul costs (you need fiber to the towers to provide adequate bandwidth) and subscribers are getting about 4 megabits of bandwidth--exactly what I was hearing years ago from knowledgeable wireless experts.

This New York Times article makes it clear that there is no free lunch for municipal wireless. There are still a lot of communities pursuing initiatives that cling to the idea that they can get a wireless provider to come in a build an extensive wireless network for free. These kinds of efforts have been and continue to fail, due to cost overruns, poor performance, and the lack of business-class services. Wireless is necessary as a mobile access technology, but it is not sufficient.

An Australian wireless ISP who has operated a WiMax network for more than a year unleashed a blistering attack on the protocol, calling it a "disaster" and that it "failed miserably." Unfortunately, the article provides little detail on exactly what frequencies were used (WiMax is a catch all term for the protocol, which can use several different chunks of frequency spectrum). The interesting thing about the comments is that the firm is planning to deploy more traditional WiFi as part of their wireless network.

Christopher Mitchel of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has written an article in the current issue of Broadband Properties.

This moderately technical article (PDF file) has an extensive discussion of the vulnerabilities of wireless systems, including WiFi, Bluetooth, and WiMax. Communities interested in investing primarily in wireless broadband should read this article first, as the data presented illustrates why most businesses do not regard wireless as a business class service.

Unlike the rest of the world, cellphones in the U.S. only work on the network for which they were originally purchased, and we have always had to buy the phones from the cellular provider. In Europe, for example, you can walk into almost any store and buy a cheap cellphone and then activate it for use on the network of your choice.

Fights over WiMax spectrum are slowing deployment of WiMax. The FCC, which manages the WiMax spectrum, has been renewing the existing spectrum, called EBS (Educational Broadband Services). The problem is that the EBS spectrum licenses, in many cases, belong to local educational institutions. Sprint wants to build a national WiMax network and thinks that the FCC should require the schools not using the spectrum to give it up.

Even as some municipal wireless projects are falling apart, many other communities are still pursuing the risky "direct to vendor" approach. Instead of identifying broader community goals and needs first and then selecting systems and technology that support those goals, community leaders are going straight to a vendor and letting the vendor specify what the community should buy.

Yet another muni WiFi project has foundered on the rocks of NoBusinessModel. WiFi vendors don't mind overselling the benefits of free WiFi, because their business model usually involves getting the local government to take all the risk. In some cases, local governments are putting up hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for WiFi systems that have yet to prove themselves.

This article discusses the collapsing WiFi efforts in San Francisco, providing a real world data point that confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time: WiFi alone is not a complete solution for community broadband.