Excuse me why I try to kiss the sky

So about 3 years ago I was really interested how municipalities would implement wifi specifically wireless mesh into cities such as Phili, San Frasisco and even my hometown Toronto. After reading the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/us/22wireless.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

I can see why all of these failed. In Toronto the idea was to get people to buy into Muni wi-fi as if it was a service provider; with Phili they didn’t use my bandwidth allocation and found out that they need more repeaters than they thought and with San Francisco well who knows.

Now if you had read about 3 years ago I really criticized the city of Toronto with the deployment of the wireless mesh using best practices, since there was not enough information on the mesh to formulate best practices or any standards around the mesh. But this blog is not about “I told you so” but for best practices using wireless mesh I know I’m right and my colleagues who have built wireless meshes all around the world do know how to deploy this successfully.

But this article is not about wireless mesh but it is about deploying an ISP. We learn from the early dial up days that deploying Internet was to oversubscribe. Today with the technology although this is still being done the over subscription model doesn’t work.

In my paper on deploying a metropolitan Internet services provider I indicated that you would need a host of services everything from VoIP, IPTV, Gaming, MTU, etc. Keeping my paths of revenue coming was the key. I guess that technology was on the Municipalities and the cost for deployment was started to become astronomical. So focusing on the main services such as applications wasn’t on people minds.

Now also I just read in Commsday web site that Wimax pioneer also said that they are too are having a problem but this time it wasn’t deployment but with the actual technology. http://www.commsday.com/node/228 Wireless is having a bad taste in people mouths because of early adopters.

Now if everyone can remember there was suppose to a wireless standard IEEE was working on. This was to ensure that everyone using wireless mesh in regardless of the type of equipment or manufacturer of that equipment. Well we are still waiting for them to ratify this technology.

Mean while the use of 802.11N and IP6 is becoming more mainstream and the early pioneers of wireless mesh or not consolidating but starting to feel the pain of the early adopters. I also started to notice a few years ago that there were instant experts on the Muni front giving consulting advice. I was very concern when I saw this for wireless mesh as the crowned so call experts hadn’t even had the experience of putting up a wireless mesh.

Now that we are going on to 5 years of hosting wireless mesh in a small corner of Toronto I can say now that the technology is sound and it time to put some standards in place that make sense.

What would I do differently? Well first to get profit you need to different streams of revenue. Lets say:

ILEC - VoIP

Cable TV using IPTV technology

Gaming site – Poker, to Xbox

Web, email, web, data transfer, VPN

Security –Video

Video Conferencing

Unified Communication

Integrated Services and Private Networks

E-commerce, Dept and Credit Card services.

Just to name a few. These are business that need to be built first they all then can be tied together using wireless mesh. The provider should either charge based on transactional basis or by flat fee. Nevertheless the establishment of commerce using this technology is paramount. Unless of course you are making a Community based wireless system and then you would need to share all the charges including depreciation of the mesh to make it work. Bottom line you need identify your revenue stream to make this work and I believe that people in Muni game may have failed to recognize this model.