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Big and Small Can Coexist

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There's no doubt that this is an exciting time to be involved with wireless. With news of massive projects in Houston and Portland moving forward, and now this article in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal that describes an RFP for the huge Silicon Valley network, leading with the compelling title It's time to see if bidders share valley's free wireless vision, there is much to be excited about. Yet as exciting as this is, there are some troubling signs on the horizon.

For starters, every one of these projects is trying to get the same or better deal from the vendors that the previous city got. And I know most of these vendors - the pot is not that big. How many vendors do cities think are standing out there ready to build networks on behalf of cities and take all the risk? I've long thought that this was a temporary situation, based on new venodr's eagerness to get networks deployed. Great if you can get in on the ground floor, but not meant to last. A business strategy based on the greater fool theory is not sustainable.

And now this huge project hangs out there, which I'm afraid to say makes me think of that ambitious movie, A Bridge Too Far, the WWII movie about a tragic overly ambitious battle plan by Allied Gen. Montgomery that in some ways became a symbol of overly ambitious big budget Hollywood projects. More recently, the metaphor was used to describe our current tragedy in Iraq. The risk is certainly great for project planners that no vaild bidders will come - so it begs the question: with new technologies that do not require great scale to be effective, why do we still plan such huge telecom projects?

If regional collaboration makes sense to get economies of scale, to pool purchasing power, to ensure that your neighbors' networks work with yours, and to share lessons learned - all reasons I've used on these pages to sing the praises of regional togetherness - if that makes sense, at what scale does it make sense to break the project up into more digestible bits?

In other words, can a big project and smaller implementations go together? I would make the argument that its the only thing that makes sense. First, in an unknown, it makes sense to sort through an uncertain territory with several dozen of your friends. When many regional leaders get together, you get better answers - the Wisdom of the Crowds that I talk about now and then here. Large groups make better decisions than small groups.

But having decided that a wireless network is good for the region, why not break the project up into as many small bites as possible, with common guidelines and requriements, so that the many smaller companies in this industry can all get a slice of the pie and the project can serve to develop the industry further.

This is the set up for NANOnet, the business I'm lanching this week. The nature of metropolitan broadband with wireless mesh is that it can be deployed economically and rationally in chunks as small as 4-10 nodes, exactly where its most wanted and needed, and that such a phased deployment gives the public time to adjust and digest this dramatic change in the way we look at wireless and broadband.

Otherwise, I'm with the authors of this article. One risk of a huge project like this is a huge case of indigestion, as those involved wait on the public to catch on and the revenues to start flowing from the new project.

Posted on April 24, 2006 at 08:25 AM

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