Well, It still amazes me how well cell 3g is working. Currently Im on a Cruise Ship sailing out of San Juan towards Aruba, we are bordering the north coast of Puerto Rico ... about 3 miles out and I have 3 out of 5 bars in my AT&T Hsdpa Card, inside my stateroom ...not that bad, AT&T will eventually migrate to LTE which promises more speed ...
Gino A. Villarini [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aeronet Wireless Broadband Corp. tel 787.273.4143 fax 787.273.4145 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Webster Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 5:58 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as"miserablefailure" This does not surprise me. I have never thought that any type of indoor CPE business plan would do well for wireless internet. There are just too many unknown factors when it comes to placing a low power CPE without an external antenna in the hands of customers. They do not understand the limitations of wireless. Things like aluminum siding and stucco with wire mesh are just a couple of the big problems that you will run in to. Other items like metallic mirror film on windows and too many interior walls between the CPE and tower site are others. From an RF perspective it is always preferable to be above all of that (i.e. Rooftop) with the radio/antenna. If most of the buildings in the neighborhood are of the same height, building losses are a non-issue because you are now above them. The only thing left to worry about is the trees. Using outdoor antenna/CPE combinations should also allow you higher EIRP since the maximum permissible exposure rules would change with the unit being away from the general public. While you can make the case for customer self installs, you would need to have many more base stations so that you would have plenty of signal to overcome the building losses. This may work in a densely populated area where you can justify the numbers (but you also have more competition). In rural markets I would suggest to anyone making a business plan, figure on doing fixed outdoor CPE installations. With a properly equipped WIMAX base station costing around $40,000, a small WISP would be able to conduct many truck rolls for that price. The low housing density markets just don't justify the cost of a properly engineered indoor CPE wireless network (meaning it would take many more towers to work correctly). There would never be the return on the invested dollar. That is just my opinion, I am sure others will disagree with me. If you want a good way to think about it, how many times have you run around a building with your cell phone in a weak coverage area to keep a good call going? WIMAX indoor CPE's will be no different. The bigger problem will be that the customer will not want to move their computer in the house just to get a better broadband signal. This will easily create an unhappy consumer, and then an unhappy investor (and also clueless management). I read some commissioned market studies (can't tell you where, but they were good ones) about the average customer expectation of how and where wireless internet should work. The scary thing was that they honestly believed that they should be able to run around the house ANYWHERE with their laptop and their broadband should just work. This was how they perceived "wireless internet" working and they did not believe that they would have to install their own wireless AP in the house to achieve this. This basic perception by the consumer is far different than we all understand these networks to work. It sets a business up to get a black eye in the minds of users (which will also stress out the folks who sold the idea to investors). Bottom line to me is, you can't ignore the laws of physics.........no matter how many times the sales rep tells you it will work.......It's all in the math. Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com <http://www.wirelessmapping.com> -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Matt Liotta Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 3:35 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserablefailure" http://www.commsday.com/node/228 Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserable failure" March 20th, 2008 Australia's first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay's Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a "disaster" that "failed miserably." In an astonishing tirade to an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok yesterday afternoon, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was "non- existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services. Freeman highlighted his presentation with a warning to delegates, saying "WiMAX may not work." He said that the technology was still "mired in opportunistic hype," pointing to the fact most deployments were still in trials, that it was largely used by start-up carriers and was supported by "second-tier vendors", which he contrasted with HSPA with 154 commercial networks already in operation and support from top tier vendors. What made Freeman's presentation most extraordinary was that just 12 months ago he fronted the same event with a generally positive appraisal of the platform which at that stage he had deployed just a few months before. At the time, Freeman said that his company had signed 10% of its 55,000 user target market in just two months, a market share that rose to 25%, on the back of an advertising campaign that highlighted value VoIP prices. He did acknowledge at the time that the technology had indoor coverage issues, which he yesterday said had earned him a quick and negative reaction at the time from his supplier, Airspan. Other early WiMAX adopters have also reported issues with indoor coverage: VSNL in India reported indoor loss at just 200m from the base station at an IEEE conference last year. HORSES FOR COURSES: Freeman says Buzz has now abandoned WiMAX in favour of a "horses for courses" policy. This includes use of the TD- CDMA standard at 1.9GHz-used by operators such as New Zealand's Woosh Wireless-and a platform he described as wireless DOCSIS- a relatively little known technology that takes HFC plant and extends its capabilities via wireless mesh. He said wireless DOCSIS operates at up to 38Mbps in the 3.5GHz spectrum and its customer premises equipment supported two voice ports for under $A70 while it boasted "huge cell coverage." He also was employing more conventional wireless mesh platforms at 2.4GHz that support up to 10Mbps with CPE voice ports costing less than A$80. Despite his problems with WiMAX, Freeman is a believer that competitors should operate their own infrastructure and not depend on Telstra unbundled or wholesale offerings. Prior to Buzz he was involved in the rollout of regional Victorian HFC networks as an executive with Neighborhood Cable. He says the use of wireless is essential in Hervey Bay, because ADSL is blocked to 80% of the population because of Telstra's use of pairgain and RIMs, while what ADSL ports are available are now largely exhausted. But years of successive government policies had weakened the case for standalone infrastructure, beginning with restrictive policies in the pay television market which he said undermined independent HFC deployments. "I'm against government micromanagement of the market. Government should start to provide a conducive investment environment." Not all WiMAX operators are unhappy. Internode says an Airspan-supplied network is providing consistent average speeds of 6Mbps at distances up to 30km, with CEO Simon Hackett describing the platform as "proven." Freeman's frank words left many at the WiMAX event looking uncomfortable but none more so than his co-panelist Adrian de Brenni representing Opel Networks. De Brenni, standing in for an absent Jason Horley, said little new about Opel that hasn't already been discussed, except to state that QoS would be a product feature of the future Opel wholesale offering "including voice." by Grahame Lynch ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- ---- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- ---- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
