EDITORIAL: Hot Spot: Houston: If They Can Do Wireless Internet, Why Can't We?
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By The Dallas Morning News  Feb. 24--By 2009, Houston expects to boast a wireless broadband network allowing anyone to connect a laptop computer to the Internet from virtually anywhere in the city.   It's no small undertaking.
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More and more venues are becoming hotspots. Using the wireless 802.11x protocol better known as Wi-Fi, these hotspots can be found in airports, libraries, coffeehouses, restaurants, shopping
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San Francisco&#39;s mayor set a goal on Thursday of providing free wireless Internet connection citywide. &quot;We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service,&quot; Gavin Newsom
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The Story: Some technologies always seem to be ?just around the corner.? Seven years ago, there was a big flurry of interest in end-to-end Ethernet (aka metro Ethernet) as a brace of new ventures promised to cut through the complexities of wide area networking.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    They didn?t deliver. One big reason: building a new network that will reach into offices and homes costs beaucoup bucks. As IDC analyst Boyd Chastant puts it, ?Digging a whole in the ground never gets cheaper.?Laying fiber is still expensive, but now telcos ? including AT&amp;T, Verizon, and Qwest ? plus cable companies such as Optimum LightPath, Cox, and Time Warner that already have fiber in the ground are offering Ethernet services. LightPath, for example, boasts of 2,500 miles of fiber in the ground and says it has lit more than 2,000 buildings in its service area in the northeast.End-to-end Ethernet offers a very affordable way to connect LANs to a wide area network. After all, every router has an Ethernet interface, you don?t need much special hardware, and the technology is very familiar. So most IT staffers will have little trouble adapting, says Burton Group analyst Jeff Young. That is, if you can get it: Pricing depends on your need for speed, and not all of the providers offer it throughout their service areas.Raw bandwidth isn?t Ethernet?s big advantage. It?s not necessarily much faster than private lines. However, says Chastant, it is more scalable. Conventional private-line services offer speeds near the bottom (around 10Mbps) and the near top (around 10Gbps), but not much in the middle. End-to-end Ethernet solves that. And it can be tied to Internet access, bumping up access speeds appreciably.Availability is on the upswing too, says Boyd. In the past, carriers worried that end-to-end Ethernet service would cannibalize other data services. But now that demand has reached critical mass, that concern appears to have faded. Meanwhile, providers and equipment manufacturers are ironing out incompatibles and clarifying service definitions in the Metro Ethernet Forum, Chastant says.It looks like we?ve turned the corner and end-to-end Ethernet is right in front of us.The Bottom Line: If your carrier doesn?t provide end-to-end Ethernet, another provider likely does. It?s worth the trouble to look: End-to-end Ethernet will give you the performance you need and because it?s a familiar technology you won?t have to retrain or replace your IT staff.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Philadelphia may spread the joy of wireless Internet access to its citizens.
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(InfoWorld) - Silicon Valley's municipal wireless project is one of the most ambitious ever attempted, but good things take time -- more than proponents thought, in this case. Organizers signed a letter of intent with a group of vendors, including CiscoÂ and IBM, last year to build a 1,500-square-mile network. At the time, the group expected a rollout beginning in January or February of this year. The fact that not even a pair of test networks is on the ground yet is a testament to the scale and complexity of the plan, according to Seth Fearey, vice president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, which is pushing the plan. If the system takes shape as planned, it will let travelers stay connected throughout a trip from San Francisco's southern city limits to Gilroy, south of San Jose. Wi-Fi may be just one of eight technologies used in the project. The high-tech region is reaching high while municipal wireless is going through a reality check. Last year, a vendor dropped out of a project in Sacramento after expressing concern over a free ad-supported economic model, and in April,Â EarthLink scaled back its municipal wireless activityÂ to focus on existing cities and major opportunities. A high-profile plan for nearby San Francisco is embroiled in a political fight because some leaders think it is a bad deal for the city. The Silicon Valley network would cover more than 40 municipalities across mountains, valleys and urban and suburban areas, with 2.4 million residents. The nonprofit Joint Venture group formed the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force to spearhead the project, and last September it chose Silicon Valley Metro Connect to build and run it. Along with Cisco as equipment supplier and IBM as system integrator, Metro Connect includes high-tech nonprofit SeaKay and Azulstar. No tax dollars can be spent on the estimated $100 million project. Metro Connect envisions a "layer cake" ofÂ perhaps eight wireless technologies, according to Fearey. Details are still being worked out, but they may include the following: *Â Wi-Fi for central areas of cities *Â WiMax mobile broadband at 2.5GHz for less populated areas *Â a public-safety network at 4.9GHz *Â DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communications) for vehicle communications at 5.9GHz *Â systems for environmental sensors and machine-to-machine communications The task force is still negotiating with Metro Connect on a "model agreement" to form the basis of deals with each municipality or agency, which is almost finished, Fearey said. Sticking points include details of prices, terms of service, minimum coverage, and privacy, he said. "It's in their hands as to when we can get this going," Fearey said. Azulstar has been the lead negotiator for Metro Connect for four to six weeks since it was designated the network owner and operator, according to Noa Eisenberg, Azulstar's vice president of marketing. The parties have made a lot of progress in the past several weeks, and Azulstar expects a model agreement to be finished in the very near future, she said. Initial forecasts of deployment starting in February may have been overly optimistic, said Glenn Loo, CIO of Palo Alto, who sits on a committee with other city government representatives working on the project. Palo Alto will host one of the test networks where all the technologies will be tried out. Meeting the needs of the many entities involved and planning coverage across the region's terrain have been hard, he said. But Loo thinks the Palo Alto test network will be up before the end of July and the main network approved and deployed in some cities by year's end. One municipal wireless consultant sees more work and delays ahead unless backers change course. They should have tackled the project like a corporate IT department and started with a few key applications to build up momentum before adding other features, said Craig Settles, an independent consultant who has not worked with the Silicon Valley team. "Someone's got to be willing to say, 'We can achieve the vision, but maybe we should simplify the initial steps,'" Settles said. "You can't sell this much complexity to the average politician."
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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Here's a problem that some investment dollars help solve. Apparently, the TechCrunch 40 conference isn't streaming to the outside world because the Palace Hotel has incredibly lame networking, and they won't allow conference promoters to bring in more wires? This is what I hear, although it's not confirmed. Emails to the conference promoters yesterday were not responded to.  I've also received emails from a number of companies announcing products at the show who want coverage on Scripting News, so my interest is not entirely idle.  So what does it take to establish one hotel in SF as the default tech conference hotel? Networking! Geez, you'd think it's obvious by now. We do things that require networks. Look in any conference room around the world for a clue. And supposedly San Francisco is the central node in the network of technology bringing all this great stuff to the rest of the world. So where is the hotel that gives us the very most basic technology to wire up conferences so that the whole world can participate?  Do we need to move the tech industry to another city? Someone please ask the Mayor or Google or someone in charge when they're going to fix this problem. It should have been solved in 1997, and it's already 2007.  BTW, here's a clue: there are some great business opportunities, beyond conferences, for the first physical location in downtown SF to solve this problem. Just ask Loic.
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WIRELESS Internet service is not only the wave of the future, but the wave of the present. Wi-Fi hot spots are everywhere, and mobile Internet devices are so numerous, it's impossible to keep track of them.
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The city of Philadelphia plans to invest in a new wireless mesh network based on the Wi-Fi 802.11b standard, and officials hope to turn the 135-square-mile city into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.
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By Andrew D. Smith, The Dallas Morning News  Feb. 16--The entire downtown business district of Clint, Texas, rarely attracts enough people to fill the Austin committee room where legislators were investigating the effects of telecom deregulation.   However, as Mayor Dale T.
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VENICE -- The idea sounds good on paper: Build a mesh network of wireless Wi-Fi base stations and let users roam around an entire city instead of providing limited connectivity in a handful of hot spots. But will it work? The City of Philadelphia hopes so.
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California passes Wi-Fi user protection bill; AT&T eyes municipal deals. Plus: The mobile Internet--are we there yet?
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Philadelphia will be able to go  ahead with plans to set up a city-wide wireless, high-speed  Internet network, but other Pennsylvania cities might not get  that chance under a new state law.
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PHILADELPHIA: For about US$10mil (RM38mil), city officials here believe they can turn all 345 sq km of Philadelphia into the world&#39;s largest wireless Internet hotspot (www.
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Q: I'm thinking about offering wireless Internet access at my restaurant, but I'm not exactly a technical person. So where do I start?  A: Good move, especially if you're competing with big-name coffee chains and sandwich shops.
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The city of Houston said Tuesday it had struck a deal with Earthlink Inc. to build a citywide wireless Internet network that would eventually be the nation's largest at about 600 square miles.