Wi-RAN and Beyond

If handsets are freed from carriers, what will they do?

With all this talk about WIMAX and Google phones, plus Pulver's renewed FWD push, and getting my hands on my friend Steve's iPhone again, I'm thinking of what features of an unlocked handset on an all you can eat flat-rate data network would have to have to drive iPod like sales.

As it happens, I recently met an expat american in charge of attracting americans to the largest nightclub in Florence. He's dating my cousin's kid. We talked a lot about italian cell habits such as having multiple prepaids and "da me un squillo" i.e. ring my phone once when you get to the appointed place. Follow the link for a more rich description of squillo usage.  In his club, they just went with a voice to text phone. Speak into it, and the recipient gets a translated text. Saying "table 19 needs a bottle of wine" into the phone winds up as a text instruction to the wait staff.  A nice management feature in a crowded, rockin' club, or a noisy factory floor.  Not sure what make/model, or whether intraclub messaging is on a WLAN or not, but I'll try to find out.  If anybody knows, tell us all in the comments.

I hope Tom is Right about 700MHz and Google

One of the avocations that Tom Evslin has is expanding broadband access in the US and building an alternative to the Cable/Telco duopoly.  In this post, he's prognosticating that Google will win a piece of the 700MHz bandwidth auction and become an enabler of true competition in delivering mobile broadband.  Its a tall order, because the hardware to take advantage of this spectrum is not commercially available yet, but I strongly suspect that they are in the testing stages, or at least in prototype.  If Google doesn't hog the spectrum for itself and becomes a true enabler, there will be insanely great opportunities to build new networks and devices that just work, over a wide physical area and boy will that rock!

The Ultimate Backwards Compatibility Trick

Jeff would like to get rid of the PSTN.  So would almost every other telephony geek in the world.  The trouble is, people don't care.  They just want to make reliable phone calls cheaper, in the same way that they have been doing for a hundred years.  Dial a number, and talk to somebody, or leave a message. Period.  And it has to work like that too.  Period.  All the machinations have to be hidden under the covers, completely, or it ain't gonna sell. Period.  The people that make it transparent will be the next kings of the world.  As a friend told me recently when we were talking about convergence, geeks will put up with a lot, but regular folk will not.

Rolling Wi-Fi oases as cures for boredom

Wi-RAN is moving beyond simply connecting users to the internet on Mass Transit, whether they be buses or trains to becoming community servers, providing stored content and local apps to people with time to kill, which is typically a ride of more than 45 minutes.  The local server part is necessary, because the mobile broadband experience is deficient, and will be for the business plannable future. We're looking for new and at existing apps to connect travelers on the same vehicle with each other, on both an asynchronous discovery basis "Who else on this bus wants to play cards?", and knitting the regulars together, in a book clubbish kind of way.  If you think you have an app that suits this model, let us know about it via plunkman at cedx dot com.

Mobile Monday and The Opiate of the Masses

I attended my first Mobile Monday event last night at the ghost of the old New York Coliseum, where there was a terrific panel discussion on sports sites and the mobile experience.  Some extremely valuable nuggets were to be had, the most important of which I thought was the one from Oke Okaro of ESPN that during work hours, everybody's banging away at ESPN.com through their work connections, but during drive times, they switch to their mobile browsers, however gruesome the mobile web experience currently is. ( and you thought the guy reading the paper while driving next to you was scary...)

The next was the global nature of the sports fan, brought home by the NBA's programs in China.  Because the mobile web is currently pretty much unusable for rich content, the primary means of sports franchises interacting with their fans mobility-wise is SMS, and one of the chief constraints of that is cost.

These web properties with vast communities of fans that want to interact with them are creatively constrained in the mobile space by the lack of mobile bandwidth and the cost of sending bits/messages back and forth.  Evidently, there's a regular "carrier bashing" segment during Mobile Monday events, and this was no exception, except that I found it fascinating that the hostages of the carriers were exhibiting the "Stockholm Syndrome".  It would seem to me that the leagues and their franchises could be huge drivers of handset sales and carrier signups, a la the iPhone.  There were many gripes about the diversity of device and browser types, and inconsistency of experience.  It would seem to me a perfect set of companies to drive unit sales of a multi-radio handheld that combined a cell radio and a wi-fi radio, where they have the huge following to market to, and venues that could easily be wi-fied to make a powerful, high bandwidth mobile experience useable.  These guys are content with the carrier's plans for bandwidth and handsets
ESPN's MVNO experience may have been a costly one financially, but I'm sure it provided a huge amount of knowlege in the space and how to do and not do mobile business, so there's some valid reasoning behind those decisions. With video being such a huge part of the sports business, you'd figure these guys would be chomping at the bit to find a way to deliver more of it to their fans accompanied with sponsorship and advertising on a device that rocked. "Nah, we're cool" was the primary reaction.

Mobile Internet for Transportation Systems

Beyond simply connecting users to the internet, I would like to explore the ways that mobile hotspots, both mobile and sessile, can provide a place to interact with people and build hyper-local communities.  As a long time rider of the Long Island Rail Road, I remember a time when regular commuters used to rush to grab the sets of seats facing each other, take down a cardboard advertising poster from its slot, and use it for a card table.

Today, a wi-fi hotspot on a train can be used to host a car or train-wide texas hold'em tournament among people that can't even see each other on the train.

Tell me about transportation systems that are taking this type of idea to the next level.

Ramping up the new network edge

We're offering a seminar on November 14 for folks that are investigating the WISP market, or are getting into it but want to know the nuts and bolts of implementation.

This is ideal for rural guys and organizations that want to pilot a wireless ISP, possibly building on a single T-1 in a centralized location.  It's a cookie-cutter approach to deployment with variations based on terrain.  If you have a lot of flat, treeless areas, the 5 GHz band may be best for you if you have to compete against DSL and want to do a residential/business ISP play.  If you have to compete against DSL and Cable, you're going to be doing hotspots, either free or paid. In a heavily treed area, you may have to drop back to 900 MHz and accept lower bandwidth for today. 

Its a day of consulting about the nuts and bolts of implementing the business plan and the technology plan, with an eye toward expansion and getting to market.  I think what's going to happen is that there's going to be a land rush in the the non DSL and Cable served territories to grab up customers, just like the low-hanging fruit of the hospitality industry was collected a couple years ago.  Some providers will have success against copper DSL plants by delivering higher upload speeds than DSL will.  Once these local guys get into place, and established, competitors will spring up, interference will ensue, and at some point, either the ILEC or a Clearwire type entity will come along, buy up the top one or two WISPs, and then convert those customers over to licensed spectrum equipment.