The IP Development Network Blog

I entered the Olympia exhibition hall yesterday and saw coffee shops. "That's about right", I thought, "after all this is The Wireless Event".

Not to be confused with Mobile, Wireless has long been associated with the ability to get your laptop out at Starbucks. It's a European-cool way of working whilst being seen, packaged by American marketeers who understand that actually we like to queue for our coffee here in the UK - possibly because we can then avoid arrogant waiters.

I digress... For some reason, the registration desk didn't have me on the list, which was no surprise given the number of emails I had received telling me that the event was X days away and that I must hurry to register. I had spoken to the people not once, but twice to make sure that actually I was registered, but I was half expecting to have to go through it all again on the day.

So with a new registration in place, I wandered through the hall until I saw a stand promoting bar-stools. It was at this point that I looked at my entrance badge and realised that this was not The Wireless Event at all. It was Caffe Culture - the annual shindig promoting the best way to serve and experience cappuccinos.

The Wireless Event was in the next hall along Hammersmith Road. My preconceptions of wireless had been brutally exposed and my embarrassment was compounded when I found that actually, I was on the list of registered attendees (for the right event) and that my cynical approach to the registration desk in Hall 1 was actually a "thought-crime" against the organisers.

In the end though, I think I would have preferred it if it had all been coffee shops with 802.x access because what was on show in its place left me underwhelmed. I was seriously unexcited by anything I saw. There were 3 categories of exhibitors that I could make out: hardware / software companies (mainly espousing the benefits of mesh connectivity), hotspot service providers and municipal broadband companies.

Hotspot service providers seem to be trying to extend coverage beyond the coffee shop and into the street and they have found that range and throughput is actually much better outdoor than in. Add to that all the local government money that is going into municipal operators to connect up the town's CCTV systems and bring "advantage" to disadvantaged towns and you are starting to see a trend.

If such local companies can build on the subsidy and actually start to win business from "real customers", you never know where it might end up, but that is a very big if. It reminds me of the early days of cable (but without the money), where every town had a different network. Bringing all that together required bankruptcy to write off all the goodwill in the purchase prices that didn't actually exist.

Even if they are all brought under one uber-provider (or a couple with peering / roaming) it will still be a service with a lot of holes in it. You need to be standing under the transmitter and as hard as the industry tries the image of the Rabbit Phone still lingers in the background. Horses for courses perhaps, but at the moment you need a ranch full of the beasts to have a sensible service that follows you wherever you are.

Providers, whether municipal or commercial are too small; they have little or no marketing money and consumers can get something pretty similar (if they want it) from the 3G networks, who do have marketing money. Oh yes, and if you get it from T Mobile, there's a fair chance that it will work in more than one place. For sure wi-fi can offer technological advantages but without coverage it strikes me as putting a couple of bricks next to each other and calling it a house.

Maybe that's why there were no mobile operators at The Wireless Event? BT was there, but they are not a wireless company at the moment having sold off O2 a few years ago and have yet to obtain a meaningful license that would enable them to step back in. Not to say that they won't, but it feels like they are the only company that have the combination of resources and desire to make the most of 802.x technology.

One company I met, Last Mile, caught my imagination with their messaging. They were talking about locally distributed content! Aha, I thought. Now there's a seriously good idea - put a hard drive into a wimax base station, seed files to it and run a wireless link to your customers so they can watch videos over the internet. Who needs backhaul?

But no. Much like a number of other companies, it seems that the message and my interpretation of the message promised much more than the actual deliverable. Shame that.

The headline of one of the articles in the exhibition brochure summed it up for me: "Wi-Fi: out of the coffee shop and into the fire".

Labels: Hotspots, Wi-Fi, Wireless Event

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# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 5/24/2007 12:32:00 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, 24 May 2007

Mesh or Mess?