Editor’s Note: Welcome to Reality Check, a feature for RCR Wireless News’ weekly e-mail service, Mobile Content and Culture. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile content industry to give their insights into the marketplace. In the coming weeks look for columns from Laura Marriott of the Mobile Marketing Association and more.
If, as Scott Fitzgerald so famously put it, there are no second acts in American lives, what are we to make of metro-wide Wi-Fi?
Long the darling idea of vendors of the technology and geeks looking for somebody to provide them with a network that they could use to hopefully access the Internet for free, the implementation has been stillborn in a number of cities across the country, most infamously in San Francisco, the city most closely associated with the birthplace of the commercial Internet.
My own opinion, long held but still increasing in its certainty, is that Wi-Fi is boring and of marginal use to true mobility (anytime, anywhere), which is not surprising given the position I’ve held in the wireless industry (read wide-area wireless) since 1998. But I believe I come by my position honestly, meaning I can defend it beyond my paycheck, and still ask whenever I hear of the next planned city-wide Wi-Fi implementation: What are those people thinking?
An epiphany
My first exposure to Wi-Fi was at an Andy Seybold conference in the winter of 1999, back in the day when he did stand-alone events in the desert to bring together the many far-flung wireless tribes. One of his sponsors, a maker of PC card Wi-Fi modems, had just been bought by Lucent and they were making the cards available for $50. At the time, I was a power user of my CDPD modem, which gave me access to a true IP-based network virtually anywhere (as defined by most cities and even select desert stops) at 19.2 Kbps, not bad given that most homes only connected at 56 Kbps.
However, after having an epiphany of a use case for Wi-Fi while sitting through one of Andy’s discussion sessions — wireless wide-area networks would be used while you were mobile, but you would roam onto wireless local-area networks when you were in-building — I bought two. (My new-found religion was not shared by my boss at the time, Tom Wheeler, who was even more brainwashed than I and left unsure why he would want to buy any. and didn’t. Eight years later, this use case is beginning to be implemented. Clearly, it isn’t all that straightforward.)
Backhaul?
The next issue to make me question the business value of the technology was that of backhaul. (It continues to be a source of amazement to me how often this question is overlooked, but even more amazing is the belief that the 11 Mbps or more speed of the Wi-Fi network is somehow the speed of the Internet access it may (or may not) be facilitating. In fact, only a couple of years ago I got into an e-mail argument with a technology reporter at The Washington Post, who insisted that Wi-Fi was some kind of (undefined) “Internet” access standard, rather than a standard for wireless Ethernet, or, as I like to call it, Ethernet lite.)
The question arose for me in the context of the original Starbucks announcement that it would begin offering Wi-Fi access to the Internet in its stores. At the time, when commercial Internet backhaul technologies were still pretty expensive, I was baffled by the business case: How could a company that could probably get by with a cheap dial-up connection to batch sales and inventory data in the middle of the night justify the cost of a T-1 digital transmission connection so its customers could surf the Web? I mean, how many additional cups of coffee would lingering customers have to drink to justify the expenditure?
Fortunately, soon thereafter I had the chance to ask the question of the woman at Starbucks (her name escapes me after all this time) who had responsibility for the initiative. and she set me straight: All Starbucks had to have T-1 connections, she said, for the purpose of verifying credit card payments quickly so that they could keep lines from forming (yeah, right). I get it, I said, you have a business case for offering Wi-Fi access because you have all that spare capacity. Not exactly, she said, we don’t allow Wi-Fi Internet access over our T-1 line because of security reasons. Starbucks actually got another T-1 line from its partner for free to provide the Internet access service. So much for that business case.
LA’s Wi-Fi
Of course, these technological and business shortcomings do not of themselves explain away the case for metro-wide Wi-Fi. But to reach my opinion that this was an idea whose time would never come, I earned my bona fides in 2004-2005 as a member of the “Wi-Fi & Beyond Executive Advisory Panel” to then Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn. Ostensibly, the purpose of the panel was to address the “big picture” question of how to make LA a place where residents and visitors alike would enjoy “convenient and affordable broadband access to the Internet,” including looking at whether or not such technologies could help address the digital divide. Of course, that supposed, first and foremost, some sort of gap in the city’s broadband Internet availability.
At the first meeting of the panel I had one question that I thought it was important for the panel to answer given our mission: How many homes in the geographic area we were looking at covering were not then passed by broadband? Answer: 99.9% were already passed by broadband. At that point, I figured our job was done. All the mayor had to do to achieve the objective was provide a subsidy to those who couldn’t afford commercial Internet access rates. Of course, the Wi-Fi equipment vendors and Wi-Fi network service providers didn’t think so, nor did the geeks who wanted free broadband access, and that is who mainly appeared before us at our community hearings to testify on behalf of a city-wide Wi-Fi network. Certainly, there was no groundswell of support among citizens and residents for such a thing, at least none that ever materialized at any of our hearings.
In our final report to the mayor, the panel recommended that the city not “lock in” on any one technological solution, but instead develop “a coordinated plan . that leverages the existing communications infrastructure,” a recommendation that looks positively prescient given the experiences of others in the metro-wide Wi-Fi game: One of the technologies’ staunchest metropolitan area supporters, Philadelphia, stumbled coming out of the gate. and basically fell flat on its face. The CEO of one of the largest metro-wide Wi-Fi service providers, EarthLink Inc., declared them out of the business. And then there is the sordid story of San Francisco, nearby to the birthplace of the commercial Internet.
There is one back story to the San Francisco saga that I think is quite telling, especially given the rhetoric of proponents about how innovative and entrepreneurial metro-wide Wi-Fi can be. I had a friend in San Francisco who was making a pretty good living rolling out Wi-Fi networks in boutique hotels there when the city announced it was considering offering free, metro-wide Wi-Fi access. His business dried up almost overnight as businesses deferred spending money on their own systems because they thought they might get access points from the city for free. Not exactly the effect on entrepreneurship proponents expected, I’ll bet.
You may contact Mark directly at MDesautels@ctia.org. You may contact RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
