MuniWireless

The app I am waiting for: Worksnug

Esme Vos — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:39:16 +0000

Worksnug is an iPhone application that uses “augmented reality” to help you find the best place in a city to sit and do your work — i.e. a cafe with Wi-Fi, co-working spaces, and more. You use your iPhone to scan the surroundings and Worksnug superimposes comments on the screen telling you if the Wi-Fi works well, whether a cafe has a warm and welcoming atmosphere, etc. It is available for London and company’s website says it will soon be in Berlin, Madrid, San Francisco, New York and other cities. Here’s an article in the Guardian about Worksnug.

The Economist on Swindon’s muni Wi-Fi plans

Esme Vos — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:01:48 +0000

Swindon (UK) is getting a municipal Wi-Fi network, thanks to a joint venture with a local firm. News reports say that the network will cost £1 million and require 1400 access points, but details are sketchy and there is skepticism about the ability of Swindon and the service provider to pull this off.

Despite that, The Economist felt compelled to weigh in with its own opinion about muni wireless:

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Special offer: Get free Telecom and Wireless magazines.

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Buy these Research Reports now:

(1) Guide to the WiMAX Band (2.5 GHz): the technology, license holders and future prospects

(2) The U.S. Mobile Web Market: Taking Advantage of the iPhone Phenomenon

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Why conference Wi-Fi sucks and how to improve it

Esme Vos — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:35:25 +0000

I was inspired to do a long article about Wi-Fi at conferences by Joel Spolsky’s article Wi-Fi At Conferences where he asks why Wi-Fi works so poorly at tech conferences. Muniwireless has organized conferences in the past and I won’t say that the Wi-Fi at our events has ben the very best either (however, it was better than at most events I’ve attended). You would think that by now, Wi-Fi access at conferences, especially tech events, would be something no one would even notice — that is, it should just work well. But that’s rarely the case.

Dewayne Hendricks (who has provided Wi-Fi at David Isenberg’s Freedom To Connect events in Washington DC, Social Capital 2009 in San Francisco, West Coast Green 2009 in San Francisco and others) pointed out that in many hotels and conference centers, the existing Wi-Fi network can handle only 20 to 25 connections at one time and the bandwidth for the network is barely enough for people who are downloading and uploading data. Conferences today have to deal with people who are updating blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages, and who are sending photos, video clips, and reports. Some attendees are also using Skype and other VOIP applications. Unfortunately, many venues are too cheap to install new 802.11n access points, and because the bandwidth that feeds into the network is too paltry, the conference organizer – if it wants to guarantee a good Wi-Fi experience – will have to bring in both the access points AND the bandwidth (for example, Covad). This dramatically increases the cost of hosting an event. (Note: Dewayne used Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n access points which worked very well at the Freedom to Connect event held in March 2009 at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD. I attended this event and would rate the Wi-Fi experience outstanding.)

Here is a sample quote (dated September 2009) from a well-known bandwidth provider for bringing in (wireless) bandwidth into a venue (each amount quoted below is a one-time fee). This is just the bandwidth; it does not include the access points, the fee charged by the Wi-Fi service providers for installing the access points, managing the event’s Wi-Fi network, dealing with problems and meltdowns, etc.

5 Mbps: $3999
10 Mbps: $5999
20 Mbps: $9999
30 Mbps: $11,999
45 Mbps: $16,999

Andy Abramson, founder of Comunicano, agrees with Dewayne’s assessment of hotel Wi-Fi and adds that most hotels have less than 5 MB of connectivity. Some hotels limit the number of users to 250 concurrent users. Andy believes that hotels have not realized how much Wi-Fi means to an event’s (and the hotel’s) reputation. Most conference attendees rate Wi-Fi connectivity as one of the three most important needs at a conference.

Q&A with Tim Pozar on how to improve conference Wi-Fi

I wanted to unravel the mystery surrounding what it takes to bring good Wi-Fi to conferences by asking Tim Pozar, a network engineer who has been hired by conferences such as TechCrunch 2009, Intel Developers Forum, SNAP and more. Below is our Q&A.

(1) Why is Wi-Fi service so horrible at most conferences, including at hotels where there’s already Wi-Fi and/or wired broadband? What can you do to improve Wi-Fi service?

There are several reasons. In the case of built-in Wi-Fi at hotels, they really don’t design it for conferences. They design it for general guest use around the hotel. They install a minimal set of access points and don’t use a number of the tricks we have used for conferences. Also, on-site hotel staff usually do not have technical expertise to address issues. Most of these installs were done by third parties that may not currently have a support contract with the hotel. If they do, or if the hotel supports it, it is done off-site by some remote network operations center (NOC).

Where a conference organizer brings in an company to provide Wi-Fi access and the network fails, it can be for a number of reasons. Typically I see small companies that are trying to grow larger and don’t test the deployment or think through all the failure points that can happen with a large-scale deployment. When I was called in to solve the Wi-Fi problems at TechCrunch 2008, the wireless provider had some serious problems, not the least of which was the DHCP server they were running, which only supported 250 or so leases. Needless to say, that alone stopped the use of the wireless network pretty early on in the conference until I came in to fix it.

I also notice that many vendors just don’t understand RF propagation and how to manage it. They think that more is better: more access points and/or more power. In most cases, this is the opposite of what you want to do as it just congests the spectrum even more. There are a number of tricks that we use at MSI to try to manage the spectrum.

Redundancy plays a big part of a deployment. If you have a conference that depends on broadband for the success of the event, you can’t have a single point of failure. Having multiple transit providers, DHCP servers, etc. are critical as things fail all the time. Having any service fail will likely make the deployment unusable and worthless for the event organizer.

(2) Why haven’t hotels and conference centers done much to improve the quality of wireless broadband for conference organizers who are already paying a lot of money to host events at these locations?

Good question. It seems that large hotel chains could make this a profitable item, but as with most hotels, they figure they have a captured event and don’t need to put any more effort into this. Also, as mentioned above,
they have had third parties come in and do the deployment. One size does not fit all events and they almost never have technical staff on site to address the problems of this deployment because it costs too much to keep them on the hotel’s payroll.

(3) Why do most conference organizers fail to provide good Wi-Fi? Ignorance? Cheapness? Both?

Both. You get what you pay for. MSI’s deployments include a significant staff that can deploy and address problems during the event quickly. The network engineers that MSI uses (including me) are veterans of decades of networking experience. I have seen a number of wireless providers who think all they need is a broadband connection and some access points thrown around the location. Of course, it is much more complicated than that.

Event organizers don’t have the technical background and skills to do the “due diligence” to see if a vendor has the ability to pull of a deployment. They really need to look at the vendor’s track record with similar deployments and many just don’t have the time. In other cases, the event organizer will choose the wireless vendor who is offering the cheapest solution.

(4) What advice would you give conference organizers? What should they look for, what questions should they ask the hotel or the company they are hiring to bring in Wi-Fi to the conference?

As mentioned above, look at the track record of the company. Ask for references. Ask for previous event’s reports. (MSI always creates daily reports on an event, including bandwidth and number of users. It also includes problems encountered.) Ask them about their technical qualifications. Have they done similar events? How many people attended these events? Were they “tech” events where everyone shows up with multiple devices — laptops, smartphones, etc.?

Meet with the company and discuss the event’s requirements. Ask them how they would deploy the network in detail: where they would place access points, how they are going to bring in bandwidth. Ask them about
redundancy such as transit providers, equipment, staffing. Ask if the gear they are going to deploy has been used at events of similar size recently. Ask them about how they will deal with outages and problems. Will they provide a high-level network engineer at all times? How will they be reached during the event?

(5) In terms of costs for providing Wi-Fi at an event, how much should a conference organizer budget (taking into account the number of attendees, size of venue, type of event — obviously a conference around streaming video/entertainment would suck up more bandwidth)?

This can vary greatly from $2000 a day for a small event (up to 300 people) and no redundancy; to $100,000 and more per day for larger events (up to 30,000 people) that could take over a conference hall like Moscone Center in San Francisco, and a serious build out that would address multiple failure points.

Tim Pozar has been a network and RF engineer for more than 20 years. Past projects, besides broadband deployment for conferences, are a 30Mb/s, 50Km connection the the Farallon Islands to support personal on the island and a live streaming camera for the California Academy of Sciences. Currently he is designing and deploying a city wide fiber network for the City of San Francisco. Pozar also designs and deploys VoIP networks for national teleconferencing companies and high reliability Internet networks for enterprise and ISP companies.

I have made this article into a PDF file posted on Scribd so you can download it, print it, send it around.

Report on Internet use in Native American communities shows huge broadband gap

Esme Vos — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:10:00 +0000

The New America Foundation has published a report on broadband penetration and Internet use among Native American communities. As you might imagine, people who live on Indian lands have hardly any options when it comes to broadband, i.e. the vast majority don’t even have it. Where wireless broadband is available, it’s too expensive. But, until you read this report, you won’t realize just how dire the situation is. Download New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses, a two-part report that includes a survey of Native American technology use normed against other national surveys, and case studies of six successful projects.

“Our exploratory analyses defy the often-held stereotypes of limited new media and broadband use amongst Native Americans. We found a dramatic uptake of these technologies amongst tribal members,” explained Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative.

“Overall, survey participants were extremely tech savvy, utilizing digital multimedia and communications at rates that are much higher than national norms,” concludes Traci Morris, Policy and Program Analyst for Native Public Media.

I hope that this report gets everyone thinking not just about broadband availability in Native American communities, but in rural communities in general, which have been left behind because the national policy to date has been to leave everything to the “free” market (we know it’s anything but a free market). I am awaiting the NTIA’s and RUS’s decisions on who gets BTOP/BIP funding.

Spain guarantees right to 1 megabyte broadband connection

Esme Vos — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:49:55 +0000

Following the example of Finland, the Spanish government says that beginning 2011, everyone in Spain will have the right to buy broadband at speeds of at least 1 megabyte per second. The government recognizes that, like telephone service, broadband is now an essential part of daily life.

Any telecom operator that has a universal service contract has to provide reasonably priced broadband everywhere in Spain. At present, universal service obligations imposed on these operators include only fixed line telephony and directory service. The government is adding Internet access to the list of obligations.

I am quite shocked to read this because large parts of Spain are mountainous and sparsely populated — the Pyrenees, Basque country, the northwest around Santiago de Compostela, the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada in the south, also very mountainous, difficult terrain. I expect that the operators will have to deploy wireless broadband in those areas to meet the government’s mandate.

Event: 19 November 2009 – New Media, Technology and Internet use in Indian Country

Esme Vos — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:32:09 +0000

On November 19, 2009, Blair Levin, Coordinator for the FCC National Broadband Plan and Daniel Weitzner, Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy Analysis and Development, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, will join a breakfast roundtable to discuss the release of a report by Native Public Media and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. The report, New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses, is one of the most extensive studies of on the ground technology use, access, and adoption in Native American lands.

As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) noted in 2004: “By virtually any measure, communities on tribal lands have historically had less access to telecommunications services than any other segment of the population.” Today, many Native American lands tribes have little or no affordable access to broadband – putting Internet connectivity and its associated benefits out of reach for many of these communities. Until now, the lack of data about the Native American telecommunications landscape has been a considerable barrier to developing informed policies to drive Internet deployment, access and adoption in tribal communities.

Demonstrating the great need to include Native Americans in the discourse around the National Broadband Plan, New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses lays the groundwork for Native deployment, access, and adoption of digital communication that is driven by and serving the needs of Native America.

Date: 19 November 2009

Time: 9:00am – 11:00am

Place: New America Foundation, 1899 L St, NW Suite 400, Washington, DC, 20036

Click here to RSVP.

Europe without borders? Not to the mobile operators

Esme Vos — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:16:57 +0000

Mobile operators in Europe love borders, in fact, the more, the better because it’s awfully profitable. Check out this post from Benoit Felten (Your phone bill this month is 46,000 Euros), a story originally published in Le Monde about a French guy who bought a 3G dongle and 95 EUR per month data plan from mobile operator, Orange (France), only to end up with a mobile phone bill that resembles a receipt for a brand new automobile: “The guy lives in Valenciennes, near the Belgian border . . . His first month’s bill was 46 000 EUR. Mind you, that’s only 485 times his nominal fee. How did that happen? According to Orange, he lives too close to Belgium and as a consequence his dongle was connecting to a Belgian mobile network more often than not. Orange, of course, considers itself not responsible for this and is claiming the full bill.”

US Broadband Coalition releases report on US broadband adoption

Esme Vos — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:45:29 +0000

The US Broadband Coalition has released its report entitled Expanding and Accelerating the Adoption & Use of Broadband Throughout the Economy (PDF format). The US Broadband Coalition is composed of more than 160 organizations working toward a comprehensive national broadband strategy to ensure America’s success in the emerging knowledge-based global economy. The Coalition includes communications providers of all kinds, high-technology companies, manufacturers, labor unions, educational institutions, utilities, consumer groups, public interest organizations, units of state and local government, and many other stakeholders in America’s broadband future.

The report was authored by a working group co-chaired by Karen Archer Perry from the Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Charles Benton from the Benton Foundation, Link Hoewing from Verizon, and Kenneth Peres Ph.D. from the Communications Workers of America and the Alliance for Public Technology.

“The report reflects 10 months of intensive work by more than 30 people representing over 25 organizations,” Perry said. “We did not merely focus on increasing adoption and use of email, web browsing, and other traditional forms of Internet access service, but we also drilled into ways to accelerate the adoption and use of broadband in economic development, health care, education, public safety, energy and the environment, and in strengthening democracy and civic engagement.”

The Coalition held an event at the FCC last Friday to discuss the report. You can watch the recorded video of the event: http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/BB4US/091113/.

Ruckus Wireless launches Wi-Fi end-to-end solution for service providers

Esme Vos — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Ruckus Wireless is launching an end-to-end managed, wireless broadband access (WBA) solution for service providers. It allows them to deploy relatively cost-effective large scale Wi-Fi networks, especially in multi-user dwellings in densely populated cities. The “end to end” means backhaul, access points and customer premises equipment (CPE). So instead of cobbling together WiMAX backhaul from one provider, WiFi mesh from another and CPE from a third one, you can get it all from Ruckus Wireless. The advantage: if something goes wrong, you get to scream at one company, instead of having to deal with vendors pointing fingers at one another.

The latest Ruckus access points incorporate 802.11n with dynamic beam-forming software that overcomes a lot of interference problems.

Large scale Wi-Fi deployments are hot in Asia

A number of service providers in Asia are using Ruckus for high-density apartment buildings. For example, WiNet Broadband in Malaysia is installing 4,000 nodes which they estimate will bring in 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2010. WiNET plans to invest over US$280 million in wireless broadband services over the next 10 years.

A service provider in India called Tikona has also deployed a large, multi-city networks. Tikona provides wireless broadband in high-rise buildings in India, serving thousands of users.

According to a recent Gartner report entitled “Consumer Broadband, Global Penetration Rates and Growth Prospects” more than half (54 percent or 95 million) of the worldwide growth in consumer broadband connections will come from the emerging markets such as South East Asia, India, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe from 2007 to 2012.

With the launch of the Ruckus WBA solution, Ruckus Wireless is introducing the ZoneFlex 7731, a high-gain, point-to-point 802.11n (5GHz) access point that extends Wi-Fi signals over kilometers at data rates of up to 300 Mbps. The ZoneFlex 7731 is IP-65 rated, operating at -40ºC – 65ºC (-40ºF – 149ºF) and features a dual-polarized directional antenna that deliver 15dBi of gain with a 30º beam width for simple positioning and aiming. ZoneFlex 7731 costs US $2,398 per pair.

Is muni Wi-Fi coming back to Concord, California?

Esme Vos — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:14:36 +0000

More than a year after MetroFi shut down the municipal Wi-Fi network in Concord (CA), the city is thinking of bringing it back but with a twist: the network will be used only for public safety and other municipal applications. Funds for the network will likely come from the federal government. This time, however, the availability of inexpensive 802.11n access points will make a citywide Wi-Fi deployment less costly and show better latency, higher speeds, improved interference management.