CEDX

Guest Commentary on MuniWireless

That tireless promoter of wide access to broadband, the globetrotting Esme Vos, extended a gracious invitation for me to write about the prospects for the Long Island Wi-Fi project, and I used up many bits in responding to her invite.  I tried to put the project in contrast with the work that we have been doing on Fire Island, and in the context of the competitive environment that it faces.  You can try to glean some nuggets from my brain dump at this link, or read the whole thing after the jump:

Lessons Learned from Long and Fire Islands

As our Fire Island Wireless network is closing out its 5^th and most successful season, I would like to share a few things I’ve learned as they apply to the Long Island Wi-Fi project. Even though the plug has not been pulled officially, the writing is on the wall for the Long Island Wi-Fi project, and its an obituary. Cablevision is launching its Optimum Wi-Fi network, offering complimentary access to 2 million wired subscribers over the tri-state area, not just Long Island, and that pretty much dries up any potential paying customers that e-path might have had.

LIRR Penn Station Hotspot Update - Service Call Logged

Managed service fans, hear this.  After a night of consulting in Gotham, I was heading back out to the wilds of Long Island, and decided to see if the hotspot in the LIRR waiting room had been brought back to life.  This time, I couldn't even associate to the network.  The rather grumpy, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, silver-haired customer service fellow didn't believe me when I said there was a wireless network in the waiting room, even when I pointed out the sign.
On the off chance I would have more luck, I went to the customer service office where I had a pleasant conversation with the younger fellow on duty, who indeed knew about the network, and was unaware of anybody having issues.  He was under the impression that few people used it. ( managed services could either confirm or disabuse him of that notion )  However, he did treat my news seriously and logged a service call with the railroad's IT helpdesk.  I won't be back in town this week, I think so if somebody wants to leave a status report in the comments to see if the IT department followed up on the service call, please be so kind.

The Great Peconic Bay Marina Joins

The latest customer of the CEDX wi-fi network is The Great Peconic Bay Marina, located in South Jamesport, New York, on the beautiful North Fork of Long Island.  Access is complimentary to slip owners, who will be given a username and password by marina administration.  We are very happy to have The Great Peconic as part of our network, and look forward to a long relationship and smooth sailing.

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LIRR Penn Station Wi-Fi Derailed, or In Praise of Managed Services

On the way back from a holiday, the fam and I stopped in Penn Station to catch our train back home.  Proud of myself for being completely off the grid for 5 days, I could hold out no longer, and wanted to see what email delights awaited me.  Having used the hotspot in the waiting room once before, I opened my laptop, connected to the LIRR_HOTSPOT_11G network, got an IP address, and... nothing.  Turns out, name resolution was not functioning.  Of course there's no way to let the railroad management know this, other than this blog post, but somebody needs to reboot the little netgear router they have running the thing.

When you offer a service, it better work, otherwise people get pissed, because they plan their movements around it sometimes.  Trust me, I've had earfuls from users expecting a malfunctioning hotspot to work.  It's like the plumbing, when it works, nobody notices, but when it's broken, all hell breaks loose.   Part of the issue with wi-fi in places is its unmanaged nature.  Things break, software and systems hang occasionally, and somebody or something needs to be on the lookout for when bad things happen and something needs a kick to get it started again.  Unfortunately, the massive number of independent venues don't get this, and it seems the railroad needs to be reminded of it too.  I'd be happy to manage the spot, keep it running, and even post some PSA's or do advertising.  Simply making sure the service is working as advertised will make folks a lot happier and less angry at the railroad.

Long Island Wi-Fi project update

Things are looking grim for the bi-county wi-fi project.  In this Newsday article, where I get the last word, and the followups on MuniWireless and Wifinetnews, the coup de grace may be administered by the combination of e-Path's classification of what kind of company it is, and the cost of pole rental to that classification.  Ugh.   I had no idea pole costs were so high for a non-telecom classification.  Reid Epstein also has another couple of nuggets in there that were news to me.  In the county budget for last year, $200K was allocated for the RFP, which I thought was outrageous,  but in the article, he reports a spend of a more reasonable $60K.

The whole business model there is shaky, especially with the outdoor network, and the two entrenched incumbents on the island providing fixed services, plus cellular data availability.  The network envisioned is in a no-man's land, where it won't have the performance to compete with wired offerings, or the coverage to compete with existing cellular mobility.  It was doomed from day one, and the thing that really cheeses me off is that it froze the market for individual municipalities to deploy their own nets, with them waiting two years to see if there really was a free lunch out there.  We had substantive discussions underway with a few villages, but these evaporated once this wacky plan came along. 

We are able to thrive on Fire Island because we can compete against DSL on price and performance, and we collect normal amounts of revenue for providing what has become an essential commodity in a niche market.  Now that we have a substantial existing customer base, we can use those cash flows to build higher tiers of service to take us beyond our current offerings into higher performance services, where it will be possible to support VoIP, adding another revenue stream.

Somebody should just put this dog out of its misery.

Westward Expansion in Cherry Grove

We've added an access point in Cherry Grove on the west end of the town, on top of the building known as Holly House.  The SSID is FIWISPCGWEST, and those residents west of the town dock should be able to see our service now, where we couldn't deliver a signal before.  To steal a page from Henry Powderly's book, er, blog, here's a google map showing our two APs in the Grove.

 

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Philadelphic Phoenix's bones are where the action is

The news of an investor rescue of the Philly network is welcome, but the devil is in the details.  The investors are picking up an important distribution infrastructure that they can use to build a business on.  The duopoly has set bandwidth prices high enough, and the scarcity of wired broadband is such that if you take that distribution infrastructure and use it to deliver ethernet handoffs, you can make some serious coin.  Especially if you can deliver better than DSL performance and bundle some perks that the incumbents charge extra for.
The free no-support wi-fi is a no brainer to pickup the rights of way and siting agreements. It allows the politicos to save face and not impede the deal.   There's no way to make decent money reselling somebody else's infrastructure, unless you have a massive account base to aggregate those slim margins over.  You have to reduce your monthly nut by owning your own backbone to your internet peering point.  Flipping the asset and giving away wi-fi while aggressively selling wired bandwidth to class B and C office buildings and multi-tenant units gives this plan a good shot at being viable.  Real estate is everything in this game.

I'm also happy to see an investor seeing promise, even in a failed network.  I hope they'd be even more interested in a profitable wireless broadband provider, wink wink, nudge, nudge!

When did MuniWiFi "Jump the Shark"?

With Philly and MetroFi opening and closing the second phase of expanding the edge of the internet beyond the Telco CO and Cable Head End, (the first was the rise of hotspots) there's lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  I think the point where it went over the edge was Ocean City's Muni project, where it was posited that the garbage cans would be wi-fi enabled.  When I read that last summer, I knew it was the beginning of the end, because the consultants were grasping at straws to justify the capital investment.  It doesn't make sense to replace a bunch of summer jobs for teenagers with electronic garbage cans.

Karl Edwards has a good guest post up at MuniWireless describing some of the better ways to move forward, and points out that Cablevision's wi-fi is not free.  Cablevision is fighting a holding action against Verizon's quadruple play, and positioning itself as delivering more for the dollar than Verizon's home triple-play offering.  When it is built out, they will be working to deny VZ the extra $60/month/line that VZ currently gets by offering EV-DO.  If wi-fi provides "good enough" coverage and a better broadband experience, then they will have achieved their primary goal.  Of course, you can do much more than that with a big wi-fi asset, but we'll have to wait and see how they execute on it.

 

As I have always said, wi-fi blankets don't work, and you have to start with an infill strategy and build from there.  I've managed to do reasonably well with that strategy, and have seen Cometa, Earthlink, and now MetroFi, come and go, while we are still standing with Fire Island Wireless, Wi-RAN, and UrbanHotspots.

Esme Vos and Andy Abramson I think were sharing a bit too much of the fruit of the vine when they posited the concept of forcing venue owners to provide wi-fi through legislation.  In most pundits' posts, nobody ever talks to the venue owners themselves, or are dismissive of them as not being customer sensitive.  Creating wifi spots is a real estate game, and the real estate owners need to look on wi-fi as a positive, not a magnet for table moochers, even in the city by the bay.  As long as you have signs like this one, in San Francisco's Caffe Roma, you will face an uphill battle to get free wi-fi embraced. 

I think we should focus much more as Esme rightly says, on Structural Separation, where the physical plant connecting businesses and residences is viewed as a common carrier itself, and service providers can compete to provide the IP or other protocol transports over it.

CBSMobileZone - Improving but model still crippled by weather

This is something I tried out in February, I'll have to go back and check it out again, now that it's warmer.

In my second test of the CBSMobileZone at 40th and 7th, I met with more success, but not happiness.  Again I got a failure to connect message, but it seemed to be spurious, and my BlackBerry connected after the error.  I was able to test with the BlackBerry browser, and got connected, but it was freezing cold out, and I just couldn't wait for the redirection from the signin page to finish.  Also, I never saw anything other than the click to login button and the Terms of Service checkbox.  The portal page needs to be fixed up so advertisers can reach handheld users, not just big screeners.

Look, up in the sky, its Cablevision Wi-Fi

Folks in the tri-state area, take a peek at the wires on your poles. If you see a box that looks like the one in the picture, you're in a Cablevision Wi-Fi hotspot, SSID optimumwifi.   This one is in front of Rockabilly Barbers' East Northport location.  I could take a picture of it, but couldn't logon to it with my Blackberry Curve.  Something about expired SSL certs.  Neither the Blackberry browser or the Opera browser worked.  I'm assured its a Blackberry bug, and not an optimumwifi issue.  We're seeing the beginning of their Wi-Fi buildout in the first steps beyond the pilot stage.  I find it a curious form of flattery that they've stuck an AP in front of one of my locations.