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June 2006 Archive

Are Boosters Liars? No, They're Pioneers and We Need Them

At times, we should all take a step back and get our footing again. There's been a debate on the blog pages in the past few days that can only be described as a tempest in a teapot. (See both these links and be sure to read the comments to get the full gist of it - it's a little like watching the Jerry Springer show, I'm afraid Point w/ Derek Kerton on techdirt: Putting A Little Lipstick On Muni WiFi, CounterPoint w/ Ron Sege on muniwireless: Chaska: Real Results are Not Lipstick). I slept on it and now I'm ready to say what I think.

At the root of the debate is the quality of service experienced in the Chaska, MN deployment and the claims made about that deployment in a case study by Tropos. I have to say, "come on folks, let's get some perspective here." (By way of disclosure, I should say that I had Tropos as a client last year - so I feel that I know them well, but with eight months removed from that engagement, can also speak with some independence in my comments).

First, those of us who are currently benefiting from the significant momentum in municipal wireless industry today should ask ourselves "Where would we be without our pioneers?" We shouldn't assume our current position and then cast stones at those who brought us here. Second, we shouldn't measure early stage players and their results with the same yardstick we use to assess well-established incumbents and what they've done. It is relative.

Finally, we should take pioneers as a package deal. The pioneer personality is a booster personality - part salesman, part rationalist, they market the benefits and discount the negatives to paint a picture with broad brush strokes with the ultimate goal of making their mark and establishing a following and changing things for the better. We all benefit when the dust settles.

Would I be sitting here today in Austin enjoying my life without early immigration boosters having described Texas as a paradise to potential immigrants, instead of the mosquito-infested, hotter-than-hell, deadly Indian territory cesspool that it proved to be for early stage immigrants? Many surely would not have come if they knew all the hardships that awaited them.

At times, a little lipstick is needed. (I won't even go into the benefits of cosmetics in this space.)

So, let's hear it for our pioneers in the municipal wireless field! (Sorry if I left anyone out you guys, but I'm drawing the line on significant personal influence that stood out from the pack, in addition to talent and input - there have been a whole host of players who've made a contribution, but these particular individuals have stood out for me by their personalities and their actions).

* Pioneer Journalists: Esme Vos (muniwireless.com), Glen Fleishmann (wifinetnews.com), Sam Churchill (dailywireless.org); Om Malik (gigaom.com)
* Pioneer Conferences: Daniel Aghion (W2i Digital Cities); Esme Vos (MuniWireless)
* Pioneer Consultants: Greg Richardson (Civitium), Scott Akrie/Eric Daversa (NetLogix)
* Pioneer Equipment Vendors: Dave Hanna, Ron Sege et al (Tropos); Paul Butcher (Intel)
* Pioneer WISP: Bill Tolpegin (Earthlink)
* Pioneer Community Advocate: Sascha Meinrath (CUWiN)
* Pioneer Deployments: Cerritos, Corpus Christi, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Chaska, Tempe, St. Cloud, Anaheim

This is an unscientific poll of one, but I've been in this space since 2003, and these are the pioneer individuals, groups and deployments from my perspective that have stood out as exceptional. They each stood up and took arrows in the back by taking strong positions and yelling from the mountaintops. So here in this space, I'd like to publicly thank each of these folks for their hard work, bravery, insights, and chutzpa.

And now a word in defense of Wi Fi. These individuals saw the potential of using a lowly, limited LAN technology as a club to start beating over the heads of incumbent giants who had been unwilling to extend broadband at a pace to match leaders in other countries. I call that creative. On the sale side, they saw a need among municipal leaders and filled it. On the buy side, they saw a new technology and tried it. Thank goodness!

My second disclosure: I think that unlicensed Wi Fi mesh has its warts and has been oversold in the past. But despite its shortcomings, it remains a very useful and affordable technology that can do amazing things when applied correctly. I think that WiMAX will be a very good complement in the near term, and that while Wi Fi mesh goes well with lots of technologies, it will continue to face challenges as a stand-alone solution when it over reaches, when the strategy is not thought out, and when the community is not well informed.

My third disclosure: I think that large-scale deployments are as yet an unproven application of Wi Fi Mesh and not necessarily the best way to go. I believe that small-scale deployments make more sense at this stage, for a variety of reasons (see my arguments on MetroNanoNet). But big city deployments are still a good thing - we are moving down this path so I think we should forge ahead and do our best to make them work. The upside of large-scale Wi fi Mesh networks still far outweighs the downside, the market wants them, they stimulate the rest of the industry and they generate lots of press, raising awareness.

Even with my own opinions, I still have to acknowledge these folks for what they've accomplished so far. They're the ones who have pretty much created something out of nothing. That's what a pioneer does - "goes where no man has gone before." It's messy, but the results are positive and we need the growth and progress that pioneers provide..

Let's consider life without Wi Fi Mesh for a moment. Here's what we have on the flip side, over in the incumbent telecom and cable space - thanks to Fred Wilson, in his blog, A VC.

We have four companies that largely control the last mile into our homes in this country, two telcos and two cable companies each control significant market share. Some of their CEOs have gone on record that they want to use tiered pricing to fund new development on their networks. Sounds good, but its crap.

First because the telcos and the cable companies have not done much to improve their networks here in the US. At best, we have 6mpbs service into our homes in the US. There are countries in other parts of the world that think that 6mpbs is so slow they don't even offer it anymore. 25mpbs is the standard and they are headed to 100mbps while we are trying to figure out how to get to 6mbps.

So putting more money into the telco and and cable pockets is not likely to result in higher bandwidth networks. It's more likely to result in more golf courses and G5s for their CEOs.

In our country, all the innovation has happened in the startup world. The startup ISPs and CLECs are the ones who first rolled out the services that the telcos and cable operators are now making money with. But would they have rolled them out if they hadn't been put at competitive risk by the startups? I think not.

I'm not necessarily casting stones the incumbents way either, because I think that these two industries have brought us a long way over the past century and that there are great companies among them. But I feel that at this point in time, they could definitely do more, faster. Most of the leaders in those two industries need to be more open to new solutions. They're milking the cow, focused on leveraging their considerable political influence to hold on to what they have, and way too comfortable to move the ball forward on broadband deployments at a pace that would most benefit the rest of us. They need the burr in the saddle that municipal wireless has become.

I'd echo Fred's comments on ISPs and CLECs with regard to the pioneers in this still very-new municipal wireless field. Would we have come half as far as we have without our pioneers? Would we have state prohibitions against municipal wireless? Who will offer an alternative to the incumbents' preferred pace of change? Where will our leadership on broadband strategy come from?

So, how harshly should we judge the statements made by pioneers and early stage boosters? Let's not. Instead, let's take what they say with a grain of salt, draw our own conclusions, and enjoy the benefits of all the energy they have poured into making something out of nothing. And let's keep in mind that our cell phones still drop in some places ("Can you hear me now?") - but we love them just the same- and that wired networks do not provide us with all that they could - but we still stay hooked up and pay our bills.

Finally, we should be wary of applying the rules of established industries to fledgling industries. Why not acknowledge that we're in the middle of creating something here and be more tolerant of each other?

On the rare occasions when I cook, I'd prefer that my guests appreciate my efforts and judge me by how good my dishes taste out in the dining room, (or by the fact that I tried), and not criticize the mess I left behind in the kitchen.

Having said my two-cents worth, I predict that human nature being what it is, we'll have a lot more of this type of critique and point / counterpoint in the blogosphere, as the larger municipal wireless deployments roll out. Hold on to your hats!

Posted on June 24, 2006 at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg

Are we at a flexion point in the development of the Municipal Wireless industry? We must ask at this point, "has the pendulum swung too far?" In their zeal to show that the public coffers are not at risk, have cities become too-strong advocates on behalf of their citizens? Recent news articles would seem to confirm that hypothesis and show us that change is afoot. I would argue it's time for cities to move back to the center and consider again just what a partnership entails.

In MobilePro's view, a higher-speed free access based on ads would not be financially viable without subsidies from the city. "It's got to be a win-win for both the city and our shareholders," Sullivan said.

The Sacramento city council will decide how to proceed this week, and Ferguson thinks another RFP will be issued soon. "We have a lot more experience now, we know what other cities are getting. The city council just wants deal points that are comparable to what we see in other cities and we were a ways off of that."
Wi-Fi plans in Sacramento unplugged

I for one was depressed on hearing last week that MobilePro withdrew from the Sacramento project. Private companies have limits in the amount of risk they can take, and that goes double for public companies. MobilePro is public. For profit companies cannot engage in poor risks and expect to stay in business for long. It's a complex alchemy between the city and the private sector company as they seek to forge a win-win in this new area and it looks like there's a long way to go before they truly understand each other's needs.

We must ask "are we being creative enough in how we define a win?" While city officials in Sacramento defined winning as getting "deal points comparable to those offered in other cities," wouldn't it have been more appropriate for them to define winning as "determining a positive ROI business case in Sacramento by cutting costs and increasing service levels"? One hopes they will get to the point where their needs will be met with their future RFP. What was the cost of delay that resulted from their increasing the ante and causing their partner to bolt? Time will tell.

This process starts to look lke the no-win world of tax abatements, which have evolved to the point where cities compete with each other to get employers to move to their town, often losing sight of long-term negative impacts to their own tax base. It appears that municipal wireless has come to the point where cities are trying to outdo each other by offering to their public constituents an ever better deal through their hard-ball negotiating with vendors. To repeat an oft-heard phrase, "there is no such thing as a free lunch." Free services are not free, so much as they are subsidized in one manner or another by a party that sees a win from their own perspective.

In my own city, the determination by our city management to accept donated wireless gear following the WCIT last month, coupled with a press release offering "free" services downtown had a chilling effect on private companies I was engaged with discussing a for-profit business model for Austin. They wondered if this was a signal that there would be no profits to come by working in Austin. While I assured them that was not the case, there were delays with real costs invovled. There needs to be some gold at the end of this rainbow, or these private sector pioneers will steer their wagons away from this frontier towards greener pastures.

See yesterday's posting on Wi Fi Net News, From Municipal Paid to Gratis: What Cities Want, where Glenn Fleishman comments on an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, opining on the migration of the municpal wireless business model, from "cities are taking unacceptable risk in owning networks" to "we will work together" to "gimme, gimme, gimme."

Or see also Intel's Paul Butcher's guest editorial in the June 2006 Digital Communities newsletter by Government Technology: Municipal Wireless Sustainability and Promise, where Paul talks sense about municipal wireless, digital cities, and digital access.

In Wi Fi, we have a technology that offers low barriers to entry, so out on the fringes, we see a plethora of small WISPs who have taken advantage of the confluence of low cost and business need to provide services and make a business. But in the largest of cities, there's a different attitude inherent in evolving RFPs that ask for more and more from the private sector bidder. Now, its not enough to share risk with the private sector partner - they must take all the risk and give away their services to boot!

I think that we will all benefit the more these network proliferate. Isn't that what Metcalfe's Law shows us? And I think that paying for a service makes one value it more than getting it for free. We tend to discount things that are offered for free. The cost of my "free" Wi Fi in any one of the Hot Spots in Austin is generally that I buy something from my host. On the rare occasion when I've dropped in and because of a long line, skipped that important step of making a purchase - well, I've felt like I took something from the provider, because I know there is a cost involved.

I hope we begin to hear more about minimal service fees in lieu of "free" and that we see more RFPs that probe the full extent of the value that these networks can offer, in a joint search for a sustainable "for-profit" public private partnership model.

Otherwise, we may see these smaller pioneer companies withdraw from the market, leaving us with the monopolies and duopolies we've had in the past, and that would be a shame. Please show your support for innovative wireless access alternatives by buying that cup of coffee or by supporting private sector pioneers with innovative and creative business models . And put your "Free Wi Fi" signs back in the closet. We should be feeding these pioneers with partnerships, not starving them with demands for more and more.

It would be a shame if these new-age wireless pioneers were to steer their wagons away from our towns and move on to greener pastures elsewhere, because we asked for too much. It's time for all of us to focus again on the meaning of a partnership and risk-sharing, and the costs involved in getting something for "free."

Posted on June 21, 2006 at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

Trip to Arizona is revealing

I just came back from a week long business/personal trip to Arizona, and the meetings I had earlier this week were revealing. I had a great mini-family reunion, then flew out to Prescott to visit my friend Hal Hayden. On Monday, I met with Hal and his partner, Bill McNamarra, the management team at Agility Solutions. They've put together a growing small business providing equipment financing to the wireless ISP (WISP) community. Over the past two years, they've sorted through the details on nearly 350 WISPs to identify the most promising, cutting deals to help their clients grow faster by releasing their cash for customer acquisition, providing financing for the purchase of network infrastructure gear and customer premise equipment (CPEs). Then on my way out of town on Tuesday, I spent a couple of hours with Ryan McCaigue, who as Network Engineer at NeoReach has acted as project manager for the WAZMetro deployment in Tempe. Ryan and I drove around Tempe and talked about the new network: at over 40 square miles, it's currently the largest deployed wireless mesh network in the US. There's nothing like getting out from behind the desk and visiting a site to get a full understanding of what is important, what matters, and conversely, what doesn't.

On Monday morning, Hal, Bill, and I had a rousing discussion in Agility's offices on the current state of the wireless ISP and infrastructure industry. Because of their focus on the private sector, they look at the municipal wireless industry realistically, aware of the hurdles the industry has yet to overcome. One challenge is the long sales cycle. Another, made apparent by MobilePro's withdrawal last week from Sacramento, concerns the desire by city governments to cut the best deal possible, shifting as much risk as they can to the private sector partner. As we saw last week, there is a limit to the risk a private sector firm can manage, and cities are testing those limits in these public private partnerships. We agreed that the most potential in wireless may well be in targeted smaller scale deployments, where the right management team can make good headway with focus on distinct market needs and execution of well-thought-out plans. Highlighting the need for advanced marketing, Bill provided a memorable quote: "if you don't presell, you're gonna fail."

And after this visit, my hat's off to Ryan and his team in Tempe, considering what they were able to pull off. With all the buzz in the press about the potential of pending wireless mesh in cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, Houston, and Chicago, we would all do well to heed the lessons learned in a network like Tempe.

First, it's not the case that Tempe is a lay-down hand just because it's located in the flat-land desert. To the contrary, I found a heavily treed environment in residential neighborhoods with limited line of sight: an urban setting not unlike many other cities. The Tempe network uses Strix Wi Fi Mesh nodes, which have four radios each, including 802.11a radios for backhaul. Ryan stressed the need for a well-designed backhaul system that integrates with a well-designed local network - note that the word "design" comes up often in talking with Ryan. His network uses just 8 take-out points to support the approximately 800 nodes, covering the 40-some-odd square miles of the network, which is a key element on why this network should prove to be cost-effective over time.

Second, the deal that MobilePro, the network's corporate sponsor, made with the city provides for free bandwidth in exchange for mounting assets (rooftops and poles) and power - the city works with the utility to secure mounting rights and power on behalf of the project. This is a win-win that should work for both the city and the network operator.

Finally, it's vital that the deployment team know what they're doing. As the industry grows, it will be increasingly important that the type of knowledge that Ryan's team has developed be applied to future deployments. The larger the deployment, the more complicated its interactivity and the greater the potential for the environment to impact its performance. I would stress the value of pilots so that the parties can work through issues on a small scale in advance of a larger, more complex deployment.

These two visits showed me the value of starting small and staying focused. It appears that the equipment will work as vendors have claimed, but that appropriate network design is vital for that to happen. To make money on the network, costs must be controlled tightly, and it helps to have a creative approach (e.g., limited backhaul points) that minimizes costs. Network like these must be well-planned and deliberately deployed. Getting an experienced and skilled team focused on the task at hand will be a vital component to success as these networks progress.

I am encouraged after seeing first-hand how these two successful companies work prudently and methodically to support two different perspectives on wireless broadband, from the micro to the metro. Wireless is coming to your town...are you ready?

Posted on June 17, 2006 at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

Huzza! Clear Thinking and Speaking from RIM CEO

Globalcomm: RIM CEO argues against unlimited wireless data

Check out this article and comments from the RIM CEO to other telecom executives for some key insights into the thinking behind the 3G data strategy. In contrast to "fat pipe" metropolitan broadband (Wi Fi mesh and WiMAX) networks that get a lot of play on these pages, the 3G data pipes are constrained by their design. Don't be fooled by the ads - Verizon et al do not want too many people to use their new data pipes.

Call it the "Baby Bear" marketing campaign. Like in the Three Bears fairy tale, they are looking for the "just right" balance of users to generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but not so much use as to strain their network capacity. See
More Limits: Verizon Prevents Treo Use As 3G Modem for more insight. I wouldn't want that marketing challenge. Talk about a fine line to walk.

Glenn Fleishman tells the story much better than I could in this article from late last year, The Surprising Limits Of 'Unlimited' 3G Service.

I predict the choices to the consumer will become ever more clear as the year progresses and large corporate plans become more transparent: Open network where one can surf unfettered at ever faster speeds v. Closed network where one will be constrained to "color inside the lines" and follow the rules. Therein lies the hope for the "little technologies that could" - Wi Fi mesh and WiMAX.

Posted on June 05, 2006 at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)