It helps you because you get to be the muni wireless company rather than
a new player who may infringe upon your market share.
George
Matt Liotta wrote:
I think you may be taking your city's view about muni Wi-Fi and applying
it to the rest of the country. For example, if you read the Atlanta RFP,
they require you to provide coverage for 95% of the city. Do you know
what the city is offering up to the winning bidder? Access to traffic
lights and city owned buildings. That's it! If you want pole rights you
still have to contract with the local utility. If you want roof rights
you have to contract with various building owners. So, what you consider
golden isn't even on the table. And its not like Atlanta's RFP is
somehow different than other major cities.
We already have roof rights throughout the city and we already pay the
local utility company for pole rights and power. How does providing a
service to the city help me?
-Matt
John Scrivner wrote:
Many WISPs have been too busy trashing the Muni-WiFi concept to look
at the opportunities. Who can blame AT&T for taking advantage when
most WISPs turned up their noses. It is not too late for WISPs to get
a foothold in the Muni-WiFi arena if they try. Turning up their noses
at the idea will not win them any contracts though. The most important
thing to understand is that getting access to light poles and
electrical power is golden. The street light based wireless broadband
platform will change over time. Eventually a platform will emerge that
will work well. There are many people who are aggressively making
headway toward building real carrier class wireless broadband
operating off of street lights. I have 4 nodes being installed on
street lights this morning. I see a day when these nodes will have
GigE backhaul capacity with redundant paths all through the air. WiMAX
distribution to homes and businesses will be the norm. This is going
to happen.
Scriv
Peter R. wrote:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060829/190813.shtml
Ma Bell's About Face On Muni-WiFi
from the /is-that-about-face,-or-just-two-faced?/ dept
Remember the good old days of... well, last year, when telcos were
telcos and they absolutely hated muni-WiFi? It was such a huge threat
to their business that they gave Congress people plenty of money to
make it illegal. Of course, that was before they actually bothered
looking at many of the muni-WiFi proposals, and recognized they
weren't really "government-run" at all, but were really no different
than traditional telco deals. The government was simply giving away
rights of way for placing equipment in return for promises of
service. The providers could still be commercial providers with real
business models. Suddenly, the industry opposition quieted down.
Industry associations claimed that muni-WiFi was great... and AT&T
(whose former employee introduced the bill to ban muni-WiFi) was seen
providing the very same "free, tax-supported" WiFi they had screamed
about just months before. Well, congrats to AT&T for all that hard
work trying to stop muni-WiFi. You've just won another muni-WiFi deal
(this one without taxpayer funding). Of course, for those of you who
thought that muni-WiFi would give consumers an alternate provider,
offering real competition to the incumbent telco... well, that
doesn't really work so well when that alternate provider is the telco
itself.
--
George Rogato
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