Esme Vos is the founder of Muniwireless.com, the website for information about municipal wireless broadband projects worldwide and wide-area wireless
technologies. Esme is also the founder of Lemon Cloud, a legal and wireless
consulting firm. Before Lemon Cloud, Esme was the Chief Legal Officer of
Spray Network, a pan-European portal
Verizon Wireless launches slow data network
It must be a really slow news day because of the number of publications reporting about Verizon Wireless' "fast" data service which has been expanded to a number of cities.
The network will download data at 300 to 500 kilobits per second, at least equivalent to the speeds of residential high-speed connections. But the network uploads data at about 50 kilobits per second, industry analysts said, making the sending and receiving capabilities uneven.
300 to 500 kilobits is high speed? Maybe according to Verizon's overheated PR. I realize journalists have to write up these articles quickly and have no time to quibble about words, but must they copy the press release verbatim from corporate headquarters and call it "high speed"? Can't journalists infuse their stories with just a little bit more perspective and judgement?
The Austin Business Journal's write-up is just as breath-taking considering Austin is the same city with probably the greatest number of free Wi-Fi hotspots and the Austin Business Journal has covered Austin Wireless City's free hotspot community project so many times. Here's the Austin Business Journal's advice:
Austinites can now access the Internet anywhere in the city using their laptops and a broadband access plan from Verizon Wireless. Austin is the first Texas city where Verizon Wireless is rolling out its new high-speed third-generation cellular coverage called BroadbandAccess. Instead of converging on coffeehouses in search of a Wi-Fi hot spot, Austinites can access the Internet anywhere.
Oh, what fun it must be to access this incredibly slow network for which they will charge you a nice sum of money! By the time you get done sending your pet's photos at an excruciatingly slow 50 kbps (if at all), you'll be wishing you were sitting comfortably in a nice Austin cafe, sipping ice tea or a cappuccino, enjoying free Wi-Fi service (thanks to Austin Wireless City), downloading and uploading at speeds Verizon could only dream of.
Let's talk about the charges for use of the Verizon data service. I hear it is $80 a month. Think about that -- $960 for a year. What could you buy for $960? Roundtrip airfare to Europe, two pairs of really nice designer shoes (maybe three if you buy them on sale), a Dior handbag, two Nokia phones, lots of dinners in fabulous restaurants, fancy health club subscription so you can finally lose weight. One thing for sure is that low-income families cannot afford their "ubiquitous high speed" Internet service.
Another thing: is Verizon's service truly ubiquitous? Or is their definition of "ubiquity" similar to T-Mobile's? I was sitting on the beach in Capitola yesterday - not exactly the end of the universe - watching my mobile phone (with prepaid T-Mobile sim card) tell me that there was no cellular service in the area. No cellular service? This is Capitola, in Santa Cruz county, just over the hill from Silicon Valley!
I have complained a lot about European mobile phone operators but at least I can get mobile phone service in out of the way places like the beaches along the coast of Cabo de Gata-Nijar (Spain), as well as the Balearic islands of Menorca and Ibiza -- on the beach (drawback: clients can all you anywhere).
There are so many black spots around Santa Cruz county and in San Francisco itself. I was really surprised since this is my first experience with a US mobile operator (I have KPN and Orange subscriptions but decided to get T-Mobile's prepaid for my US visits in order to avoid the roaming charges). A lot of very basic things need to be improved first: black spots, unreliability of SMS service, just for starters. And now they are rolling out data services. I just don't think they can handle this complexity. But at least their PR machine works very well. Here's the evidence:
Two cities will be getting citywide wireless broadband coverage: Amsterdam and Philadelphia. In Amsterdam, a private enterprise called Hotspot Amsterdam plans to cover the city with a Wi-Fi cloud that would allow anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled device to get Internet access for a fee that is far lower than that being charged by Swisscom Eurospot and KPN for access in hotels, cafes and other venues.
Meanwhile the city of Philadelphia plans to deploy its own Wi-Fi cloud throughout the city and provide access for free or a very low price.
What does this mean for hotspot service providers? If I need Wi-Fi access in the center of Amsterdam, Hotspot Amsterdam will charge me 4.95 EUR per day and if they actually get their act together and deliver citywide coverage, I can sit with my laptop in the park, in the city center or at the train station and get a connection. Compare this to what Swisscom Eurospot charges for access at participating hotels: 9 EUR per hour and a whopping 29 EUR per day, plus you need to be at that hotel or cafe. KPN, the local incumbent, charges 5 EUR per hour and 10 EUR per day and again you need to park yourself at a particular hotel, cafe or venue.
What happens to T-Mobile and other hotspot service providers when Philadelphia does the same thing and offers free or cheap access? I am seeing more communities deploying Wi-Fi clouds, recently in Hermosa Beach, with free access. If I can get free or cheap citywide Wi-Fi access in a large number of cities around the world, why should I sign up for T-Mobile's or any other provider's Wi-Fi service when the roaming "advantage" of such a service is meaningless? Doesn't this have implications for everyone who feeds off that food chain, including the roaming-billing software companies and aggregators?
Kiss the girls and make them cry: the cellular industry's mission
Three women driven nuts last week by the cellular industry (mobile phone operators and manufacturers): Danah Boyd, Ma Bell and myself. Danah Boyd writes that she was driven to tears by T-Mobile after spending hours trying to mobblog at SIGGRAPH using a mobile phone (lent to her by a friend). Despite the patient and kind T-Mobile tech support, they could not figure out how to get her phone to work on their network. They asked her to call the maker of the phone but the latter refused to talk to her because the device is not supposed to be available in the US. You can just imagine that conversation: "You are not authorized to have that phone in that jurisdiction. This is strictly forbidden!"
Just as Danah was crying into her phone, Ma Bell (AT&T) was hopping mad at AT&T Wireless for its lousy service, according to Om Malik. AT&T Wireless' poor service appears to be damaging AT&T's brand. In an SEC filing, AT&T claims that AT&T Wireless takes too long responding to customer service inquiries. Nothing worse than betrayal to break your mother's heart.
Finally, my own miserable experience with KPN Mobile. I canceled my useless GPRS subscription (8 EUR per month for 1Mb) last May but the charges kept appearing on my monthly bill. So I emailed them last week (using their fancy web-based eCRM system) and got the following response after two days: they could not process my inquiry unless I gave them my client number. Huh? Who walks around remembering client numbers? They have my mobile phone number, name, address and other details, and I just assume that they know what my client number is. To ask me for this piece of information - which is unknown and irrelevant to me - before they can help me shows their utter contempt for their customers. This was not the only unpleasant experience I've had with them. Last year, I kept getting billed for KPN's i-mode service although I did not even have an i-mode phone. It took several months and many phone calls to get it straightened out, including a call to their PR department. KPN Mobile finally issued me a refund for all those months but the process nearly drove me to tears. After the latest "client number" experience, I'm just mad.
This brings me back to Danah's frustration in trying to use her friend's camera phone to mobblog using her operator's network. Mobile operators today are promising all kinds of new services - location-based applications, interactive games, video clips, etc. Like a kiss, which brings the promise of better things to come, the hype surrounding these sophisticated services far exceeds the operators' ability and desire to deliver them in a friendly, efficient manner. If they can't even get their billing and customer service up to an acceptable level (i.e. one that does not bring out their customers' inner demons), how do they think they can pull this off? Does it come as a surprise that many people are eagerly awaiting the arrival of near ubiquitous Wi-Fi service and Wi-Fi enabled devices which allow you to use plain old Internet access and therefore bypass your operator's network with their weird "we-don't-support-your-phone" policies and pathetic customer service?
I've been guilty of dumping on Swisscom Eurospot's lousy Wi-Fi service in Europe (see Cory Doctorow's post) but today I had a really bad experience trying to get access through one of Belgacom's hotspots in Antwerp. The tech support was great - very friendly and sweet, but the process was painful.
First, you have to get one of those scratch cards. The cafe I had lunch in - Cafe Berlin - ran out of them. So I went to an Irish pub on the Groenplaats. They had piles of them. I got one, turned on my laptop and had to call tech support to tweak the settings on Windows XP. Length of time with tech support: 15 minutes (on a mobile phone connection). Then, I found out you need a Belgian mobile phone subscription, although tech support told me to try anyway because it works. Sometimes. Apparently Belgacom has decided that the benefits of Wi-Fi are NOT to be extended to foreigners. Never mind if you happen to be from a neighboring country like France, Germany or the Netherlands. What if you are from the US and your phone does not work here? Screwed.
Next thing is that you get a splash screen, type in the log id on the card, then hope that Belgacom sends you the login password (this occurs via SMS) so you can actually use the network. Unfortunately, I have a Dutch mobile phone. So I had to call tech support again to get the password. They told me sometimes foreign mobile phone owners get the SMS, sometimes not. I can tell you that they don't because I've been online now for over 30 minutes and not one SMS from Belgacom has come in.
Finally I am online and writing this but what a huge pain! Is this nasty Wi-Fi experience common to people who use these operators' hotspots? I am convinced there is a conspiracy among European operators to make Wi-Fi as unpopular as possible in order to get people to use their UMTS services.
With the official recognition of bloggers as members of that sacred tribe, the Press, at the Democratic National Convention, a war of words has broken out between the high priests and the newbies. Danah Boyd feels that the New York Times ran a demeaning article about bloggers. Other bloggers have weighed in saying that the mainstream press is afraid of them.
I have a different opinion. Journalists who have written on muncipal wireless broadband tell me that my blog, Muniwireless.com, has helped them research and finish their stories quickly. Blogs that focus on specific issues are now great sources of information for journalists. By visiting one site (example: Corante) they have access to the experts and accurate information much more quickly than in the past.
Through blogs, newspaper and magazines also find freelance writers who can contribute articles on specific subjects. Granted a lot of blogs are just stream-of-consciousness diary entries, there are enough that can add value to a newspaper's content.
I am praying the Google IPO succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of the founders, VCs and investment bankers. Why? Because it reminds me of the Netscape IPO, and remember what happened after it went public - the start of the dotcom party. It has become fashionable to dump on the dotcom days and dotcommers, on silly business models and sock puppets. But I remember it as a time when I and many others had lots of work, gained experience in many aspects of running a business, met a lot of interesting people and traveled extensively.
While the newspapers were talking about people going B2B (back to banking) and B2C (back to consulting) after 2000, I do not know anyone personally who has gone back to a dull corporate job. My friends are running their own businesses and what's great is that there are all these cheap tools out there like open source software that allow people to start on their own. Who knows whether my friends' businesses will grow into the future Googles and Ebays.
If you have been reading technology news lately, you'll know it's an unusually busy summer for mobile operators. European and American operators have been launching their much-delayed 3G services. Unfortunately, all of them have decided to price the service way beyond what a lot of people are willing to pay for slow 200 kbps connections. Is this a way to get customers?
When the mobile operators paid billions for their 3G licenses, they did not foresee the rise of Wi-Fi, an alternative wireless network to carry data (and now voice) traffic. By the time they got around to launching 3G service, this is what the world has come to look like: there are thousands of hotspots and hotzones around the world, voice over IP has become very popular (whether it's Vonage or Skype) because of its convenience, ease of use and low price and handset operators are about to release Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones. This means that anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled device can do all that calling and data downloading via a cheap wireless broadband network that offers a lot more bandwidth. Although Wi-Fi isn't as ubiquitous as mobile phone connectivity (yet), it's getting to the point where it is not that hard to find and where waiting until you get within the range of a Wi-Fi signal is not inconvenient (especially considering the price difference between a 3G subscription and Wi-Fi).
In recent months I have noticed more cities deploying citywide Wi-Fi networks for public access. Hermosa Beach is set to launch their free citywide wireless network in August. Spokane has a large hotzone deployed in the downtown area. Chaska, Minnesota and Scottsburg, Indiana already deliver citywide wireless broadband service to their residents. A wireless ISP in Grand Haven, Michigan even offers mobile Wi-Fi throughout the city. Los Angeles is trialing a downtown hotzone with plans to expand it to other parts of the city. ISPs in densely populated Asian cities are testing citywide wireless mesh networks to carry voice and data traffic. Since most people make mobile phone calls within their city and to people who live in the same city, how attractive will mobile phone and 3G subscriptions be when you can make those calls over a Wi-Fi network everywhere in your community? Look for severe price cuts in voice and 3G subscriptions.
As the price of wireless broadband equipment drops and the different technologies (mesh and antenna) get getter, even more cities and regions (counties and provinces) are considering wide-area Wi-Fi networks. Houston County, Georgia has even concluded a successful trial of a county-wide network: they were able to deliver 5Mpbs over a distance of 12.5 miles (20 km). Wait until WiMAX equipment becomes available and cheap.
Unfortunately, the temptation on the part of the operators to cripple Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones is too great to resist. Imagine getting your Wi-Fi mobile phone from your operator only to discover that it does not work on Wi-Fi networks that are not affiliated with the operator. Here is where the computer industry comes in. Manufacturers such as HP are set to release Wi-Fi enabled tri-band mobile PDA devices that work on any network. Guess who's going to win?
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