At 4/2/2012 09:22 AM, Jeromie Reeves wrote:
>Right. This is the next part of the puzzle. John Scrivner wrong to the
>list a email titled [WISPA] Future of Wifi Offloading WAS: Ericsson is
>buying BelAir, betting on Wi-Fi.
>
>This auction sums up my post in that thread. The cellco's are getting
>smarter about what the users want and about how to
>deliver it to them. Look at the partnerships that cellco's are making
>with cable co's. The cable companies already have large
>high speed footprints. Its trivial to throw a cable modem with a AP in
>it onto a pole. Suddenly you have a very large roamable
>footprint, if only that wifi chipset had a little more cellular sauce
>in it.
Just to clarify, "AP" generally means WiFi. Most smartphones already
have WiFi, so it's just a matter of getting them to use it. But the
cellcos could also choose to adopt picocells or DAS, where they mount
a cell on every block or so, possibly hanging from the cable. That
latter case uses the cellco's licensed frequencies. It puts more
pressure on their spectrum, but lets them bill for the usage.
Since Americans prefer flat-rate plans, the cellcos seem to be moving
away from charging by the bit and more towards monthly plans. This
changes their incentive from wanting more bits to wanting
fewer. Think about how the LD business moved away from advertising
usage ("the next best thing to being there") to discouraging usage
(railing against "access stimulation"). So it looks like they'd
really rather your smartphone move to WiFi when home and not tie up
their network.
>Atheros chips very well could do it with some good
>firmware, look at Ubnt. They are pretty close with their GPS, for a
>small in house project. Look at what Ubnt did with just a
>highly experienced RF team? AirFiber. Now do the same with more money
>and in a cellular project aimed at very small and
>very fast cells. Sky is not falling, yet.
Atheros is now part of Qualcomm, which of course makes cell phone
chipsets too. There are already cheap femtocells (home-based) that
do the RF side of the cellular system (NodeB) while parasitically
feeding the customer's Internet connection, giving the cellco, in
effect, free backhaul. (Why should Vonage have all the fun?) An
outdoor picocell is a bit more complex but practical in an
aerial-wire area. Of course it doesn't do much good in an
underground-wire area. Femtocells haven't caught on that much here
because WiFi is picking up the load. They are mostly useful when you
are just out of range of a base station and need to use the cellphone
at home; WiFi offload doesn't work for receiving phone calls.
But going back to the original thread, there's some irony here in how
the cellcos almost screwed themselves when trying to screw us. They
had inserted wording into a budget bill that would have banned the
FCC from providing any more unlicensed spectrum. Their minions on
the Hill thought that they wanted it. But while the lobbyists were
pushing that message, the folks on the ground were trying to move
traffic to WiFi, and thus their own cost-saving plans would have been
hurt. They got word back to the Hill on time and thus concurred with
WISPA and almost everyone else that banning unlicensed would be a bad move.
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
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