Sorry for the late reply on this; sometimes life takes presedence :)
Doug, you definitely hit a number of things on the head, there. There is a _definite_ need for some much more...shall we say, mature network platforms in the wireless industry, and then for that equipment to be available at affordable prices. Still, I don't necessarily agree with you (Doug) on the pricing. Good stuff like you're describing will never be cheap simply because there aren't enough units produced and sold to make it profitable at lower prices. Is it expensive? Yes. Still, do keep in mind that multi-tenant solutions in the non-wireless world are considerably considerably much more expensive that what you mentioned, not necessarily in terms of gear but definitely in terms of infrastructure (fiber or whatever). This is, btw, done again and again at very lucrative profit margins in aggregate...it would be worth your while to study your competition in the industry and see how they make money :). I wouldn't really expect for the price of such equipment to fall considerably, btw, simply because a large portion of the independent market often is price-conscious to a fault, meaning that too often, a lot of the providers out there deploy less-than ideal systems simply to save a few dollars. As a little "inside/outside" observation about the independent provider industry, the guys who tend to do better are the guys who, at least when it counts, will pay major money to get the right platform in place, and then sell the hell out of that platform. In a weird sort of way, I sometimes wonder if the ebay / jerry-rig approach that often goes on (which, is often quite technically sound) almost hurts simply because it allows service providers too often to deploy platforms that don't really have a critical mass. Sometime, if you're up for either some humor or hurting (depending on where you're standing), talk to Peter (rad-info Peter) about cost and pricing and profit in the industry. He's got a lot of good insight on the busness operations side of service providers about all the stupid ways that independents often do very bad calculations in their business planning (for example, forget to figure that it costs you money to bill and invoice). The same thing goes into the technical platforms as well. A lot of you guys tend to fixate on the cost of the routers or APs or whatever (ie central networking equipment). If you do a "total cost of ownership" to your platforms, it often becomes clearer why doubling the cost of your router doesn't really raise your costs all that much and often provides much better value. Anyway, back to my point, whatever that was :). Definitely more mature platforms will have to come in the wireless industry. As a general observation, the biggest difference between the wireline service provider gear and the wireless industry stuff is 1. bandwidth to some degree 2. lack of mature provisioning systems and mechanisms. The wireless industry is still very focused on the connection rather than a service. (for those who haven't really dealt with the other) Provisioning by the service means that you provision services on your platform. Your platform tracks usage, capacity, and so forth, and gives you the ability to "provision" a service that has some guarantee of bandwidth on an end-to-end basis. For the most part, the wireless industry still operates a little too heavily as just a series of dumb "pipes" (wireles or not) without no non-overly-cumbersome methods of provisioning across the infrastructure including various classes of services across the infrasrtucture as well. As a result, WISPs networks tend to be an entirely "best effort" approach end to end. Anyway, just some thoughts and ramblings. Back to other stuff for now... -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies On 6/18/07, George Rogato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For Last Mile- > FreeSpace Optics can be had now up to 1/2 mile for as low as $5K. GB > manufacturers are going to realize soon, the day of the huge profit > margin will be a thing of the past. The competition is here on all fronts. > > Tom DeReggi > RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc > IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband Yep, I just did a 100meg FSO link and it was around $5k for the link. I wuld have preffered to do fiber and I'm sure it would have been not much more, but the beaurocracy to get where I needed to go was slow moving. George -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
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