Category:  Orientation

Site Shuffling: Applications find a New Home

I'm rearranging furniture, as it were, so I thought I would give you a heads up. I will probably do more of this as I find the right combination to make information on this site easier to find and more convenient. Look for Applications (formerly, Uses of a Municipal Network) under the Leverage heading going forward.

As we get more and more familiar with broadband networks, as our level of sophistication grows, it becomes less and less compelling to realize that "I can get on the Internet and check my email, wherever I am" and more intriguing to realize "I can do 90% of what I currently do easier, cheaper, and faster by using broadband network technologies, sometimes on the Internet, sometimes on a local network." It sounds like a Dr. Seuss book, "Oh the Things You Will Do With Your Municipal Network" ... once you have a wireless network. So let's assume for a moment that you have your network - what now?

This is in fact a great exercise to go through in your planning phases (i.e., begin with the end in mind, don't start your network without a full understanding of its value to the community).

I asked a pair of knowledgable, experienced high tech salesman last week: "Do you think these networks will sell based on an understanding of the technology, or on the basis of solutions and applications - what you can do with a network?" They barely skipped a beat before answering in unison, "Applications." The solution business starts from the premise that the customer has a problem and wants a solution, not from the premise that the technology is COOL. So while it is typical of a very early stage market that the early buzz would be about the capabilities of the technology, we can expect to see more and more attention paid to the applications, as wired and wireless broadband networks become more accepted as an alternative service delivery mechanism.

A few cases in point concerning new applications, in recent conversations:

* Disaster Recovery Network, fixed or mobile - when nothing else works, your municipal network should, or you should be able to set up another one in a few hours time
* Intelligent Vehicle coordination, traffic light synchronization, parking meter collection, and other traffic purposes
* Emergency Medical services - video delivery to mobile units (X-rays, etc.)

I hope we see more and more of this type of reporting. I will collect articles on applications and park them here. So, please play along with me and let me know when you see a good application - I'd like to collect as many as I can and create more and more subcategories. I think this is where it really gets fun!

Posted on July 25, 2005 at 03:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Orientation: First Things First: - Get Smart - "Wireless" Smart!

Whatever knowledge you may bring from past telecom or wired networking experiences, this field is new enough that you'll want to learn new vocabulary and get familiar with the context of this emerging wireless landscape. For the novice or the well experienced network planner, a pause to refamiliarize yourself with the background information offered in this section will be time well spent. Use the Orientation section to get your bearings on this new world of wireless, as detailed below.

Wireless Broadband represents the potential of the future and that future has now arrived. Originally a technology for home and office networking, Wi Fi gained popularity in Hot Spots, and now it has been enhanced to create Metropolitan Mesh networks that cover whole cities, and WiMax looms on the horizon with still more potential. This technology is currently affordable, capable, available, modular, scalable, and adaptable to many uses, most of which are only now being discovered.

A key reason for the growing popularity of wireless broadband among municipalities is its value and immediacy, and its flexibility as either a complementary solution on the way to a wired network or as a final network solution. It's easy to understand the excitement when comparing metropolitan mesh networks to the other options with significantly higher equipment, design, and deployment costs that can't be ready in short order like metropolitan mesh can:
- high bandwidth/high mobilility for metropolitan mesh, installed in months vs.
- high bandwidth/no mobility options like fiber or cable; and
- low bandwidth/high mobility options like 3G cellular networks.

These technologies are disruptive enough that you may find your assumptions challenged, and dynamic enough that there may be a new development that changes the way you look at things.

The subsections will be updated frequently, and there will be two options for viewing - directly from this website, or download sections to print and load into a loose-leaf binder.

The Orientation Section is organized as follows:

Resources:
Glossary of Wireless Terms
SMEs (subject matter experts) and Blogs (web logs)
Websites and eNewsletters
Books and Whitepapers
Organizations

Wireless 101:
The Nature of Networks
Mesh Networking
WiMAX
Broadband over Power Line (BPL)
Security
Spectrum

Laws and Regulatory:
Municipal Broadband Policy Debate
Spectrum

Uses of Metro Networks:
Public Safety
Neighborhood Security
Utility Automation

Business Models:
Public Private Partnerships
Municipalities and Utilities

I appreciate your suggestions. Send me an e-mail

Posted on May 16, 2005 at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack