The Tortured Road To Ubiquitous Broadband Wireless

THE TORTURED ROAD TO UBIQUITOUS BROADBAND WIRELESS
[SOURCE: RedOrbit, AUTHOR: Michael Finneran, dBrn Associates]
[Commentary] The analyst community appears to have come to the decision that municipal Wi-Fi is a dead issue. You'll recall that municipal Wi-Fi is the idea of building city-wide networks based on Wi-Fi mesh technologies to provide broadband Internet access to the general public. While the business model was flawed, it's important that we don't overlook the goal and the potential to use mesh technology in conjunction with business plans that do make sense. To those of us in the wireless business, the muni Wi-Fi idea was a loser from day one. Wireless offers a number of advantages, in particular mobility and access to communications facilities quickly or in areas where it is difficult to install wires. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, wireless technology will not be as reliable as wire-based facilities, so if you can get a wire, save yourself the aggravation and do it with wires! Muni wireless has all the inherent shortcomings of wireless- particularly in indoor environments where the customer needs a repeater to make it work effectively-and none of the advantages. So if you're looking for home or small office Internet access, you still get a better value proposition with DSL or cable modem service. The longer-term goal should be to at least have reliable, high capacity, ubiquitous wireless Internet access available at a reasonable price. Given the nature of wireless technology, that "reliable" part will probably require a mix of technologies and a user device that is smart enough to sense the radio environment and access the most appropriate network that is available.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1012679/the_tortured_road_to_ubi...