Almost five years ago when I started my Masters program at Virginia Tech, the wireless LAN industry was almost non-existent and wireless was all things cellular. In 2001, the Communication Network Services of VT (parent of my research group) started a pilot WLAN deployment project of which I was a part. It was one of the earliest and largest campus WLAN deployments inspired by the now legendary Wireless Andrew project at CMU. It was an awesome experience at a time when WLAN was bleeding edge.
Cut to today. I live in Philly where the city Mayor recently proposed the setting up of the largest single WLAN network encompassing the entire Philly downtown and some suburbs. I was excited on hearing about it. Philly downtown has three fairly big Universities-UPenn, Drexel and Temple. The aim of the program is to provide affordable high-speed service to low income residents of the city and also the many thousand students who cannot otherwise afford high-speed access. This move which envisions a $10 million investment by private sector and the municipality would result in 4000 wireless antennas hoisted upon lamp posts over the next 18 months. The private sector isnt really enthusiastic since the largest cable operator in the US, Comcast has its headquarters in Philly and doesnt want to pay for something that would reduce its cable internet subscriber base. Verizon Communications also isnt happy since its trying to make money with its $30 a month DSL plan. They believe that the municipality wants to hurt the hand that feeds it in form of donations and taxes.
This brings us to the question: are socialist ideas of taking broadband to every home at affordable prices really the best for the corporate community that feeds the municipality to a vast extent ?
Is the Philly project, arguably the largest such in the country, a landmark event or one big mistake ?
17 comments:
Not all my friend. Instead it will bring in more people to the wireless world. the private sectors can offer services to them at a premium.
this is the age where conventions are starting to loose ground. wireless is the next big thing. ads and services can reap from it.
Comcast should think of providing some value added service.
nice post, but i couldn't understand most of the things (even after reading thrice...)
hellboy
Saranyan
I am with you on this one. But see, there is no premium waiting to be made. Broadband wireless access will soon become a commodity(802.11b products already are) and when it that, to make money from it is difficult.
Could you suggest any value added service, that is not already being provided ?
Hellboy,
If you are in India, its only a matter of time. If you live in the US, I am surprised :)
Manoj
Thanks for stopping by. I pay 20 dollars(discounted for first 6 months) and will soon be paying 40 odd for my cable internet. I agree its expensive. But then, given that competition isnt really much, can we expect any better, any soon ?
Comcast which is a huge employer in downtown Philly area is already pushing its lobby to make sure the Philly municipality plan is tailored to fit its business plan.
I hope the customer doesnt lose out, like he did when the Bell cos took hegemony over basic telephony services and charged)and still do) exhorbitant prices for telecom services.
thats why I said, conventions are losing ground. if comcast wants to just provide connectivity, then they will loose.
companies can provide music, on demand video, gaming, audio, conferencing. throw in some ads here and there, and you make money from that too. manoj said that, provide high-quality bandwidth, thats a value added service.
when you have millions using the internet, making money will not be a problem :)
"panam sambathikka aayiram vazhi irukku, athukku intha punithamana (?) broadband a payan paduthaatheenga :)"
ranga,
please go ahead and be very surprised. ;-)
i am observing....
Renuka
Hellboy
THat was nice of you to admit though :)
Renuka
I am not sure if I got what you meant.
Security might be one of the biggest issues. MPAA and RIA will vehemently oppose this since they will have no way to track down the potential movie downloaders and movie seeders. I could be driving down the streets of phily commiting credit card frauds and hacking to banks and business and there is no way to track that too. Also I am wondering what happens to the interference? If it is 802.11b/g then it operates in 2.4Ghz ISM band in which microwave owens and garage door openers, latest cordless phones wideless use this band. The proposed Wireless MANET, will cause interference to these devices and will experience from those devices. Last and probably the major issue what happens to the radiation from these antennas, how is it going to affect the health. It is shown that kids esp. are more easily affected by these harmful radiations.
Last but not the least important is the implementation issue. In the CMU project they had tough time with the network design, so they had to assign everybody under the same subnet so that they didnt have to worry about mobility problems. Routing under mobility will be a challenging issues, given the vagaries in the urban channel modelling handoffs will be more critical problem.
Finally as Saranyan pointed out, commercially this looks to be promising. TLB simple marketing model could be say "Overture could lease some base stations and use a part of the allowed bandwidth to deliver targeted ads." Even other companies will see this, an ideal marketing outlet targeted at people 18-35 bcoz they are the ones who are more liekly to use it.
Naattamayin Theerpu: Ithu oru kannadi veedu.
Nattami
Ungal varavukku nandri.
Now to reply to your comment:
Interference management is now a much more in-control factor than it was in the early days of WLAN. The company I work for itself has an interference mitigation solution for 802.11 networks.
Mobile IP implementations are now getting more prevelent whereby you can roam between multiple subnets without having to drop and pick up a new connection. While I would love to call it seamlessly, its almost right now.
Health hazards havent been a big concern, atleast not yet.
Finally, the design calls for a subscription model whereby your MAC will have to be registered. This way, all IPs assigned to you can be tracked to your MAC and so piracy will not be easy.
TLB,
Thanks for welcome. I am humbled :)
Can I reserve an job in your company? (if at all i graduate :)).
I work on the physical layer, only basic interference cancellation has been implemented to cancel interference from other comparable networks.
As far as the higher layers goes my understanding is very basic and I would love to learn something from this discussion. Forgive me if I ask some stupid questions.
1) My understanding is that TCP performs badly with mobility and there are some proposals, nothing concrete has been standardized by IETF. I beleive STCP (streaming TCP) is likely to be the winner. SOme other proposals break the end-end protocol design in wireless networks.
2) IPv6 solves most of the problems of mobility, becuase of the extended header(128 bytes) so each node can automatically configure itself in the new subnet.
3) Health hazards are a definite concern, not many took this seriously in the early days cell phone implementation.
4) A question out of academic interest, " Is there any study on the hand-offs in hte urban environment. The indoor propagation channel and outdoor propagation are really different, even in the outdoor if it is an urban environment, it is even more drastic as there is too much multipath signals, if mobility is thrown in the pot we also need to worry about fading. Are you aware of any practical study of hand-offs in the urban environment.
Sorry if these questions had re-kindled your lab mate or advisor asking questions during your time at VT. I knew MIT -Lincoln lab did some study but their work was more on channel modelling rather than on the hand-offs.
Sorry for all these postings, i couldnt find any other way to ask these questions to you.
Naattamayin Theerpu: You can take a researcher oout of research, but not research out of researcher.
p.s. Baba makkalai ennai mathiri manishante irunthu kapathu :)
Nattamai
My email id is rangaprabhu@gmail.com
Why dont you send me your email and give me some time to reply to your post.
Interference will be an issue. it also depends on the number (and frequency as well) of bands we are allowed to operate. Mobile devices may consume more power if things get ugly and the reciever looks complex.
Locating a person shouldn't be tough, as anyone can be assigned a unique IP at any time (thats possible as we have IPV6 now :))
ranga,
me saying, all these going over my head now looks very prophetic to me. ;-)
hmm... so much to learn
Saran
Interference is indeed an issue on paper. But there are enough antenna diversity mechanisms to mitigate it to a large extent.
And even without IPv6, there should be just enough concurrent users to be managed using IPv4 itself and tracked.
Hellboy
I am sure I have that much to learn from you on something else. Will wait for that enlightenment.
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