On 12/7/02 9:39 AM, Julian Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I actually think this is the only way that Cometa will get their > 20-50,000 hotspots. A few thousand of them will be big ticket, high QOS, > professional installations. The rest will be self-installed on a > franchise model. At least that's how I'd do it if I were them.
My reading of Cometa's announcement is that they are not, in fact, building a network, but instead offering infrastructure building services to large venues and organizations. They'll build a unified authentication back end, but I expect they'll go the vendor-neutral route of allowing aggregators and roaming partners to use the network on a revenue-splitting basis. When they say they're rolling out 50 cities, I think it's more likely that they're saying, we're offering services in 50 cities. The whole announcement has been an interesting way to spin a very boring services offering into the hottest thing around. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Glenn Fleishman, Unsolicited Pundit: read my work at http://glennf.com freelance reporter for The New York Times, Macworld, InfoWorld, et al. Macintosh columnist, The Seattle Times http://seattletimes.com/ptech/ read all the wireless networking news at http://80211b.weblogger.com/ daily Web log musing on technology and my life http://blog.glennf.com/ -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
