WiFi – Page 4 – Archived Lafayette Pro Fiber blog

VOE: “Cincinnati Bell Wireless launches Wi-Fi/cell service”

Voice of Experience Files:

From our new “Voice of Experience” files: Lafayette will want to note that wifi/cellular convergence is emerging at the edges of the cellular business.

LUS’ unique fiber/wifi IP-based network will allow some pretty nifty voice services to emerge. Our utility will be able to put together an interesting Voice ecology that combines VOIP on fiber with its wifi network to allow your personal phone number to reach you in multiple ways, to enable on-the-fly conference calling (with video?), access back to data held online or in your base computer, combined chat/voice/video/SMS connectivity, digital recording, message forwarding to any IP address, and more…

Most LPF readers are, I suspect, care most about the internet and recognize the central role cable TV will play in paying off the system. Relative to those highlights, voice gets ignored. Maybe it shouldn’t be—convergence is moving from talking to commercial products in the voice arena and Lafayette will be positioned to ride the wave as wifi mobile telephony emerges while our system is built over the next 18 months. (What we need is a partnership with a mobile carrier…on which more below.)

The immediate inspiration for those reflections? Margaret Reardon’s blog entry on the launch of Cincinnati Bell’s* new wifi/cell service. (Their local paper has a short article as well.)

The long and the short of it is that your phone will switch seamlessly between the cellular network and approved wifi networks. The service is an add-on 10 dollar a month charge on your wireless bill. Partially offsetting that monthly charge is the fact that any time you are on a wifi network your minutes are free. Really. And that “approved” means approved by you, not Cincinnati Bell. You can validate you personal or work or favorite coffee house wifi network as a connection point. Or you can use Cincinnati Bell’s own wifi network of 300 points without any setup at all. Get near one and your phone call switches over to wifi automatically and your minutes are still free. (Incidentally, Cincinnati Bell offers free access to its wifi network as part of its wired high-speed internet package; I hope LUS will do something similar.)

T-Mobile is the national cell carrier who is widely rumored to be planning the nationwide launch of a similar service, Hotspot@Home, in a few days. (They’ve been trialling it in Washington state.) That makes T-Mobile the obvious candidate for cellular partnership with LUS. The trade-off would be simple: LUS gets a national cellphone partner whose phone will work across the country and who is actively developing new integrated services. (Nobody will buy a wifi service that only works in the city of Lafayette.) T-Mobile gets virtually guaranteed dominance in Lafayette and the environs. (If you do most of your calling from within the city you can easily go with the least expensive calling plan since those calls won’t run up minutes. Who wouldn’t go with cheap–and local?) It could be a great deal.

Voice is something to watch. And Cincinnati Bell and T-Mobile are the actors to follow.

——————-
*Cincinnati Bell is one of those “asterisk” companies — part of the Bell system since 1878 but never owned by Ma Bell, it is probably the largest “independent, local” phone company in the nation. This first-in-the-country initiative is further evidence that local ownership of telecom networks is a good thing.

Geeky extra: Both Cincinnati Bell and T-Mobile are using a “glue” technology called UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) which allows providers, and to a lesser extent users, to hook into multiple protocols and tools. Most crucially for the current discussion it facilitates seamless handoffs between cellular and wireless networks. But it goes much further than that. If you are masochistic enough to want to follow it out you can start at the rather thin and querulous wikipedia page.

“Cheap wi-fi too slow”

“Cheap wi-fi too slow” so says :

Bill Tolpegin is vice-president of planning and development for the municipal networks unit of Earthlink, a US-based company that built municipal wi-fi networks for cities including New Orleans, Philadelphia and Anaheim and has been asked to devise plans for networks in San Francisco, Houston and Atlanta.

This is in line with Lafayette Pro Fiber’s long-held position—wireless broadband as currently conceived is not a viable substitute for a wired network. But that’s a pretty shocking comment coming from a major player in the muni wifi business who has been selling wifi as if it were a subsitute (not an addition) to a powerful wired system–What Tolpegin is saying is that his companies networks are too slow. Why? The answer is instructive for Lafayette:

He says the wireless mesh technology advanced as enabling wi-fi to quickly and cheaply cover wide areas can only do so at very slow speeds…

The mesh is slow because it relays data from access point to access point, he says. As traffic hops over these networks the available bandwidth is quickly consumed relaying data back onto a faster, wired network, greatly reducing the bandwidth available for each user.

The only way to get around this problem, Mr Tolpegin says, is to create “injection points” on mesh networks where data is transferred to a different network in order to relieve the wi-fi mesh of the need to carry all data, all of the time.

Translated: mesh networks need to consist of less mesh and a higher percentage of nodes that tie directly into the high-speed, wired, backbone. Mesh technologies, which promised a cheap infrastructure built on few–hence cheap–backbone connections isn’t panning out in practice.

There’s more:

Earthlink has struggled to find commercially viable ways to make the task easier. “Nobody has high-bandwidth, low-cost networks that deliver,” he says. “They are not telling the truth, not even the WiMax vendors.”

The answer, he says, is far denser deployment of wi-fi access points.

So Earthlink’s hard-won experience tells people two things about building high-speed wireless networks:

minimize the mesh, work as close to the wired backbone as is possible
maximize the density of the nodes

Lafayette’s unique situation—with the wifi provider running a massively capable fiber network down every street—allows us to take a slightly different perspective on these truths. Because we will make an extremely capable network available to every user at a very reasonable price there will be little pressure to make the wireless network in Lafayette struggle to provide “dsl” or “cable” equivalent capacities for fixed uses. We’ll have fiber at our fingertips for in-home and business use. Should we want wireless inside our house we can easily provide it for ourselves. The wireless network can be “freed” to be the wireless, mobile extension of the full network—not a low-priced substitute for it.

With LUS both the fiber owner and the wifi provider, it relatively easy for Lafayette to follow Earthlink’s advice about minimizing the mesh. Earthlink has to pay, every month for every drop off the hardwired network and for the bandwidth it consumes. Lafayette will only have to pay once for the hardware drop and the incremental cost of using that bandwidth will be very nearly zero to the extent that taffic remains within the LUS network . Earthlink and LUS will be in radically different fiscal postures and the advantage is all to LUS (and her customers). In fact, LUS already appears to be planning to minimize the mesh in its network—the intial order was for a 1:1 ratio between fiber fed nodes and “radio-only” nodes. (The story says that Earthlink is struggling toward a 2:1 ratio between backhaul feed nodes and radio-only ones.)

Earthlink’s advice about node density is, no doubt, also a good one. I’ve no idea how densely LUS is planning to pack our network. But it is worth noting that what they are buying with denser placement is faster speeds–wifi speeds fall off dramatically as you move away from the node. Because Lafayette’s wireless mobility system will not be burdened with being an adequate subtitute for a DSL or cable system—as it is when it is introduced as a cheap alternative to those products—we’ll be able to consider a density that works best for wireless’ unique mobility functions. Currently those applications center around data and voice and require less bandwidth than video. (Though video, albeit small video, appears to be coming.)

All in all Lafayette’s decision to emphasize building a fiber network as the best choice for a community network seems more prescient every day. Wireless is not an ideal technology for your primary network; its best role is to be hung off an advanced wireline network to serve those mobile purposes fixed wireline connections cannot fill. And, as an additional, ironic benefit it turns out that the most economically sustainable way to get a cheap, truly high-bandwidth wifi network is to commit to building your own fiber to the home network first.

Lafayette is doing it right.

Huval Reveals Plans @ the Martin Luther King Center

Terry Huval set down in front of a group of citizens at the Martin Luther King center last night, took a deep breath and issued a soliloquy on the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) project.

Councilman Chris Williams holds a monthly “Real Talk” meeting at the center on Cora that features local issues and worthies and the worthy last night was Huval and the topic: “Update on the Fiber to the Home and Utility Issues.” Much of it we’ve heard before but to get it all in one place and directly from the horse’s mouth was a treat that revealed how the head of the system is thinking about the project. But there was some pretty significant “new” news and a set of equally significant reaffirmations.

New News:

Parallel deployment of a WiFi network. Previously I’d understood a “soon-after” deployment schedule. This will no doubt still depend on the initial testing working out well but this is now the plan. And it is MOST welcome news. Once it spreads into the national media we’ll get a lot of interested and envious comment. (I think this is the smart way to deploy wireless.)
LUS will roll out fiber more quickly than originally planned: the schedule we’ve heard involved an 18 month wait from the bond sale to serving the first customer, that is, somewhere around the first of the year in 2009. (Someone is gonna get a nice Christmas present.) It was to take three years to complete the buildout city-wide. Huval is now saying that advances in deployment technology will allow him to cut that time by a third to two years making Lafayette a fully-fibered city by the dawn of 2011…
“Our slowest speed will be faster than their fastest speed;” and you will get what you pay for. The internet portion of the services LUS will offer will be faster than the incumbents’ current fastest speed which, when I checked the web, is Cox’s 12 meg “Premier” speed. That’s a bit of a surprise even to me–I’d previously heard that the lowest internet tier would be 10 megs and was plenty impressed by that. Huval also emphasized that LUS would make sure that you get the advertised speed. If LUS sells you 10 megs you’ll get 10 megs if you check a speedtest like the one at the Communications Workers of America site. —I just checked and I got about 3 megs download and 555 k upload on Cox’s 7 meg package using the CWA speedtest (@9:30 AM). I’d be interested in hearing your mileage in the comments. That is pretty respectable vis-a-vis the nation but it isn’t half of my package speed.
50-70 channels on the basic cable package. Contrast with 22 for Cox. This may not be new but I don’t seem to recall it from before.

Significant Reaffirmations:

Intranet speeds, aka peer to peer speed, aka full insystem bandwidth, aka cool. Too new to have a settled name this is the greatest, least understood feature of the new network. It embodies Internet equity: Every Lafayette internet subscriber will, regardless of how much they pay for their connection, be able to communicate with anyone else on the network at the full speed available at that moment. Citizen-subscribers are equals on the Lafayette network. This policy underlines the difference between a community-owned resource and a for-profit company. With it Lafayette becomes the ultimate testbed for new big-bandwidth services like video telephony and sophisticated conferencing setups that require large numbers of diverse users with ultra-highspeed, symmetrical bandwidth for a honest field test. This will allow our citizens’s tastes to help shape the future of the net. And it will shape our own future as a democratic community as we move forward together into an age where digitial communications shape our interactions.
Retail WiFi. We will get a chance to add city-wide WiFi to our LUS telecom package. Can you say “Quadruple Play?” I’ve long hoped for this. Yay! Now what we need is a contract with a major cellphone carrier that will let us use WiFi phones in-city and their cell network outside.
No hookup fees; no contracts. Go with LUS and you’ll never feel “trapped” in your contract because there will be no contract. The no hookup fee is a significant concession considering that Huval mentioned that he thought the cost would be 6-700 dollars per home to pull service from the street.
20% savings on the triple play. That’s still in place; I’d worried that in the years of incumbent-caused delay a lot has changed and that keeping that committment might be harder—but the promise is still in place.
Symmetric Bandwidth. You buy a 12 meg package and you’ll get 12 megs of upload and download. Contrast that with my current Cox package: 7 megs down and 512 k up. Thats about a 14:1 ratio. LUS will charge me less, give me more speed down and much, much more speed up. I’m in. (I wonder if now is the time to start lobbying for static IP addresses?)

It’s coming folks. It’s coming.

Thinking in Tucson, AZ: Getting it Right

Muniwireless points to a study, meant to inform about how to write up a request for proposals for Tucson’s prospective wireless RFP that caught my attention. First, the extent of the research and the detail in the study far exceeds that which goes into most full proposals, much less the RFP. A large amount of information about broadband usage, digital divide issues, and market questions is in this study—enough to provide plenty of well-researched data to support both public purposes (like economic expansion and bridging the digital divide) and to support a strong marketing plan (it includes current costs of broadband and geographical usage patterns).

Lafayette needs such a public document. Without the baseline it provides it will be difficult to demonstrate the success of the fiber project. You need such a baseline to demonstrate the economic benefits and to document the effects of lower cost broadband on bringing new faces into the broadband world.

But if possible, even more impressive than the original survey research was the quality of thought exhibited. Doing a study like this is a job–and most folks are tempted to do the job to specs even if that is not what is called for by the reality of the situation. CTC, the consultants doing this study didn’t succumb to that temptation. The job specs, it is clear, were to tell the city how to write an RFP that get private agencies to provide city-wide wifi without municipal investment. Universal coverage, closing the digital divide and economic development were apparently important parameters given the consultants.

Trouble is, it’s become clear that the private sector simply won’t, and perhaps can’t, fill that wishlist. And CTC, instead of just laying out what would give such an RFP the best chance, more or less told the city it couldn’t have all that without at least committing as the major anchor tenet. That was responsible, if unlikely to make the clients happy. And on at least two other points (Digital Divide issues and Fiber) they pushed their clients hard.

1) Digital Divide issues:

The interviews indicated that as computers become more affordable, the digital inclusion challenge that needs to be addressed is not as much equipment-based but rather how to overcome the monthly Internet access charge. (p. 18)

Concentrate WiFi provider efforts on low-cost or free access – not the other elements of the digital divide. (p. 17)

Entering the digital community is no longer about hardware; it’s about connectivity. The hardware is a one-time expense that is getting smaller and smaller with each day. Owning a computer is no longer the issue it once was. Keeping it connected is the real fiscal barrier these days. As their survey work shows, the people most effected know this themselves.

A CTC review of Lafayette’s project would note we’re doing several things they say most cities neglect to do: 1) LUS has consistently pushed lower prices as it major contribution to closing the digital divide—(and we must make sure that there is an extremely affordable lower tier available on both the FTTH and the WiFi components). 2) Ubiquitous coverage is a forgone conclusion; LUS will serve all–something no incumbent will promise (and something they have fought to prevent localities from requiring). 3) Avoiding means-testing. Lafayette’s planned solutions are all available to all…but most valuable and attractive to those with the least. Means-testing works (and is intended to work) to reduce the number of people taking advantage of the means-tested program. If closing the digital divide is the purpose means-testing is counterproductive.

About hardware, yes, working to systematically lower the costs and accessibility of hardware through wise selection, quantity purchase, and allowing people to pay off an inexpensive computer with a small amount each month on their telecom bill makes a lot of sense and should be pursued. But the prize is universal service and lowering the price of connectivity. Eyes, as is said, on the prize.

CTC additionally recommends against allowing extremely low speeds for the inclusion tier and for a built-in process for increasing that speed as the network proves itself. It also rejects the walled-garden approach, an approach which they discreetly don’t say out loud, turns the inclusion tier into a private reserve that will inevitably be run for the profit of the provider.

Good thinking…

2) The Necessity of Fiber

CTC also boldly emphasized fiber, not wireless, as the most desirable endpoint for Tucson.

We strongly recommend that the City of Tucson view the WiFi effort as a necessary first step, then look at ways to embrace and encourage incremental steps toward fiber deployment to large business and institutions, then smaller business, and eventually to all households. (p. 19)

Although wireless technologies will continue to evolve at a rapid pace, wireless will not replace fiber for delivering high-capacity circuits to fixed locations. In addition, fiber will always be a necessary component of any wireless network because it boosts capacity and speed. (p. 20)

The report explicitly rejects the theory that wireless will ever become the chief method for providing broadband service to fixed locations like businesses or homes. Few in the business of consulting on municipal wireless networking are so forthright in discussing the limitations of wireless technologies and the role of fiber in creating a successful wireless network that is focused on what wireless does best: mobile computing.

Again, good thinking.

Communities would do well to think clearly about what they want, what is possible, and the roles of fiber and wireless technologies can play in their communities’ futures. CTC has done a real service to the people of Tuscon. Too much unsupported and insupportable hype has driven muni wireless projects. That unrealistic start will come back to haunt municipal broadband efforts nationally as the failed assumptions show up in the form of failed projects. But those mistakes were not inevitable. The people of Lafayette should take some comfort in the fact that we haven’t made the sorts of mistakes that Tuscon’s consultants warn against and are planning on implementing its most crucial recommendations.

WBS: “Lafayette, La., takes broadband to the air”

MuniWireless, an influential website focusing on municipal wireless projects, discusses LUS’ upcoming wireless project in a recent post:

After 18 months and $1.5 million in legal fees, the city of LaFayette won the right to build an FTTH network for its residents. Now it’s forging ahead to add wireless service.

They go on to talk about an eventual build that will cover the entire city an provide wireless services for municipal and utility workers and eventual public safety applications. The muniwireless movement has been regrouping–free public wifi turns out to be a dubious economic proposition–and proponents are now urging municipalities to focus on just such muni services as the “killer app” which makes such wifi clouds justifiable. Lafayette is out in front of that trend; and it is satisfying to be seen as ahead of the curve.

As discussed here previously, municipal services are not the complete story. WiFi will also eventually be offered to the public, most likely as a very low-cost addition to home or business internet service. And, precisely because LUS will own a dense fiber-optic network, it will be able to fund an “extremely robust” bandwidth. That stands in direct contrast to most muncipal systems where the dirty little secret is speeds are lousy–not because wifi isn’t capable of blistering speeds. It is. Speeds are lousy because the links to the backbone are, for physical and financial reasons, kept to as few as tolerable and the link speed is shared among many users on multiple mesh-dependent repeater nodes. LUS’s network won’t be like that. The initial buy of wifi radios was set at just about half “gateways” directly connected to fiber and half “repeaters” that hand off directly to the gateways. LUS’ network will be capable of amazing speeds. In a conversation with a guy at the Tropos TechSouth booth I asked about the expense of each gateway. As it turns out, Tropos’ gateways are just repeaters with a switch flipped. Further, the device to interface each gateway to the fiber is really cheap–so there is very little cost advantage for a fiber network owner like LUS to “make do” with fewer gateways. LUS will have real speed available. LUS’ “generous” attitude makes it likely that such speeds will be offered to the community.

The wireless portion of our network alone will make us the envy of every tech type in the country.

When you add in a fiber to the home network with the lowest tier at 10 megs of symmetric bandwidth and full insystem intranet speed connections between all subscribers (so the techs were saying on the floor of TechSouth) people will be blown away.

There will, quite literally, be nothing that compares with the integrated fiber and wifi big broadband system we will have.

Nothing.

Synergy

In a story on the LITE center the following thought-provoking bit appeared.

Bryan Fuselier’s company took readings inside the Superdome to measure interference and cell phone signal strength, as part of a contract with a large cellular service company.

LITE took that data and placed it into a three-dimensional space, so that the clients could walk around inside the Superdome, identifying the cold spots and looking for solutions. The same thing could be done on a larger, citywide scale, Fuselier said.

Hmmmn. One of the big problems with municipal WiFi has turned out to be “tuning” the system. —For instance, coverage is dramatically effected by leaves…yes, leaves. So no system, at least in our part of the country, can be adequately tested in the winter. And one season’s growth can really change reception–what worked last year may not work this year. It’s complicated — complex — and a huge computational problem with a staggering number of independently changing parameters.

Perfect for a supercomputer/visualization complex. Wouldn’t it be nice if LITE could shortcut some of the inevitable issues with getting a really functional WiFi network up and sustaining its effectiveness?

Something to think about.

TechSouth 2007

TechSouth starts next Tuesday in Lafayette’s Cajundome Convention center. It’s one of the premier tech conferences in the South and this year’s lineup is no exception. If you’ve got an interest in technology–either from a business or an enthusiast perspective–going for TechSouth’s quick, FREE pre-registration is a no-brainer for locals. You’ll be treated to a set of resources unavailable in most of the country and certainly rarely free.

There’s the usual variety of exhibitors, seminars, and interesting keynotes (The ever-popular CTI of SGI makes a return appearance at the sold-out luncheon but you can still sit in on the presentation sans food.) If you scan the lists of events (especially the seminars) you’ll be able to pick out the ones that suit your personal or organizational interests.

Of course readers of this blog will have a special interest in matters relating to Lafayette’s new broadband systems. I say systems because it has become a quietly accepted assumption that a municipal wifi system will be coupled to our fiber to the home network. So now we’ve got two leading-edge technologies to watch–and TechSouth is a great place to finger the goods.

The exhibit hall is where you’ll find the fiber-related stuff. LUS has taken up a suite of four booths. Go and get your info from the horses mouth; the engineers that will be running the project will be on on hand. Wave7, a major fiber player, has a booth. But fiberistas should also make their way to local Abacus (home of fiberina), the Motorola booth for its fiber products, and, if sufficiently hard-core, Cisco’s.

On the wifi end you’ll notice a wealth of exhibitors. Tropos is the most obvious–LUS’ RFP has made Tropos equipment the standard by which they will measure other equipment. So go take a look at their latest and greatest; you’ll see it, or something like it, going up on polls here. Nortel has a muni wireless division. Motorola has wide-area wireless as well. But the wifi moment of note will be the two morning seminars (8:45!):

Municipal Mesh Wireless Networks: Practical considerations when building large public wireless networks. Presented By: CISCO and
Municipal Wireless Broadband Technologies. Enabling the entire solution to provide a network that works for you. Presented by: Nortel

Lagniappe of possible interest: LATG out of New Orleans is a Sun partner that appears to specialize in governmental contracting…readers may recall the early-in-the-fiber-fight discussions with Sun — Joey Durel had Sun CEO Scott McNealy on his radio show discussing the possibilities of using Sun terminals hooked up to high-speed fiber for really low cost computing. (Don’t recall? Try: (1,2)) I know some folks are still enamored of the idea and it would be one way to attack digital divide issues. So it’s interesting to see LATG make an appearance across the basin.

Food For Thought: LUS’ Wireless RFP

A little more than a week ago I posted a piece about LUS’ Wireless RFP (request for proposals) and asked a few questions. Since no one else answered them I decided to go down to City Hall and pick up a copy for myself.

For those who might have missed the story, LUS put out a call for proposals to supply what was described as a wireless network for LUS and city use. No mention of public access was made, though locals familiar with the way that the LUS fiber project evolved from purely utility purposes are reasonably hopeful that a wireless network will evolve in the same way.

The RFP itself is pretty simple as such things go and you have to think that bidders will need to request further specifications. But there is enough there take a stab at answer the questions I asked earlier.

Note: this is an 802.11 “WiFi” mesh network. That’s the same architecture that is being used in metro wireless installations from Philadelphia to San Francisco. For the technically inclined: the hardware standard described involves two radios operating in two different bands. Specifically, the equivalent of Tropos’ most advanced access points, and its software, is specified. (Tropos is the market leader in metro WiFi.)

1. Does it include a very strong backbone “supply” element?

Yes, It is hung directly off LUS’s current fiber ring. –It will not be crippled by running off a wireline supply source that has less capacity than it is able to use. (The expense of providing for adequate “backhaul”–and sometimes the ability to find such at any price has been a major limiting factor in most public muni WiFi efforts.)

2. Are upgrade “hooks” part of the proposed deal?

Yes, the request makes it clear that there will be at least a “phase 2” (official protestations aside) and that proposal should take into account the networks eventual expansion to full coverage of the 45 square miles of the city. The access point model specified is the first of a new generation from its maker and future models in the family are promised to be interoperable with these and to support emerging technology and standards like MIMO and WiMax and older standards like public safety.

3. Does it assume ubiquitous fiber?

Hmmn…well maybe or at least implicitly. Nothing beyond the first layer, “phase 1” is specified. But assuming that what is described for phase 1 sets the pattern for the future it looks like the plan is to make full use of the fiber. Wireless mesh networks are built around ratios between aggregation access points that are connected to backhaul networks and simple mesh network which are only connected to other access points via wireless. Common acceptable ratios are 5 or 6 mesh nodes per aggregation point. All too many systems are using larger ratios and putting up with the resulting performance issues. A gold-plated system would use a slightly smaller number. The ratio LUS is suggesting for phase 1 is 1:1.3. That is astonishingly low and only makes sense where the wireless owner also owns the backhaul network (in our case fiber). Other users would have to pay per drop for their microwave, WiMax, T1, fiber link, or the like and such per drop costs would run up the expenses very quickly. Maintaining such a low ratio would mean deploying a system of pretty astonishing capacity. While policy might limit the bandwidth allowed, nothing in the network itself limit network speeds. They could conceivably run at near the rated speed of 802.11 protocols that underpin it–currently about 54 megs.

4. Does it use owned spectrum for local backhaul? Or open? Or fiber?

Fiber. This is certifiably yummy. See above.

5. Does it use open spectrum for the final connection?

Yes. This is a “good thing,” for it means that a multitude of low-cost hardware will be able to access the network. Proprietary spectrum has some advantages for local governments and, generally, some is available to it for various safety functions but such networks cannot be practically be opened for public use.

6. What technologies are specified….WiFi, WiMax, etc…?

WiFi is specified. The suggested hardware is software upgradeable.

7. What applications are supported; either explicitly or through the specification of indicative standards?

Support for a wide range of applications including surveillance video, voice, data, mobile communications-seamless roaming, VPN, and meter reading are in the specs.

Long story short: There is nothing here that would impede using this as the core of a very capable public wireless network. Caveat: there is no particular reason for me to assume that it will be — beyond sheer desire and my own belief that a wireless component will be necessary in the coming competition with AT&T/BS and Cox.

WiFi, the Quintuple Play, and Lafayette: The Biggest Story Barely Told

As we approach year’s end I tend to get a little reflective. All the news media are starting to churn out year-in-review pieces that highlight the biggest stories of the year.

Being fairly contrarian, I tend to want to do an anti-big story. What story that should have been a big story but never got played that way? For my money the biggest not-a-story story of the year was the continued insistence by everyone from the Mayor, to the CIO, to the director of LUS that they really, really intend to build a wireless network in Lafayette.

As I look back over the months of blog posts I see that at least as far back as mid-October last year you see hints that people understood how inexpensive a wifi network would be as an addition to fiber. By January Joey Durel was telling the Independent in no uncertain terms that wireless was on his wish list for the next 12-18 months. The idea continues to surface every couple of months as officials drop little hints. Not long ago Durel complained that we’d have had a wireless network a year ago if it hadn’t been for the obstructionism of BellSouth and Cox.

But even with all the national heat over wireless networks and municipal wireless networks, we’ve not gotten very excited about it here. Part of that has to be our fiber-based blasé. Fiber is what generates excitement here. We’re right about that: fiber is more important and more interesting. But, hey, we’re from down here–we can get excited about CRAWFISH, for Pete’s sake. You’d think we could get excited about fiber and wireless.

Granted, fiber is what a community needs to control its own future. Local control of the last mile and having a viable competitor to the national monopolies is the first order of business for any community that wants to guide its own destiny. Granted, fiber’s bandwidth puts to shame the bandwidth of wireless and, granted, its rock-solid connection to your home will always be more reliable than wireless can hope to be.

But wireless does have its virtues…

It especially has its virtues inside a fiber-based information economy.

Now, the conventional wisdom is that wireless’ biggest virtue is that it is “mobile,” meaning that you can connect from anywhere and that you’re never out of touch. True, but more reflective thinkers recognize (and Jon Fitzgerald has been pounding this for years) that it is also location-based. In order to negotiate a signal, wireless systems have to know roughly where you are . . . and that knowledge can be used to make available local information. With a properly configured system, every wifi client could be its own little GPS locater, with the attendant potential for helping you find the nearest po-boy effortlessly . . . and of having sushi ads pushed at you (every silver cloud has its dark lining).

I’ve written a couple of times about the potential a wireless addition to fiber would open in making possible a “quintuple” play–adding wireless data and cell phone capacities to the current plans for fiber-based cable, phone, and big broadband. Back then it seemed a way to leapfrog the competition. Less than a year later, with BellSouth rumbling about cable “sometime soon” and Cox having developed a partnership with Sprint/Nextel, it is clear that adding wireless to the fiber play will be the competitive way to stay ahead of the pack.

Most folks don’t talk about the voice capacities of wifi networks because it is hard, very hard, to provide the nodes of a wireless mesh network with enough bandwidth to reliably serve voice to any sizeable number of users. Additionally, every “jump” between wireless nodes as packets are shuttled back to the backbone adds hesitations, “latency” to the mix and voice begins to stutter and pause very noticeably.

All of that brings us back to the idea that wireless is especially fantastic inside a fiber-based information economy. Most ways of provisioning a wireless network with bandwidth involve setting up some sort of radio/microwave hookup back to a big broadband backbone and then using that to parcel out bandwidth to wireless “access points” which then further subdivide the available bandwidth by meshing together and dividing the bandwidth again. The packets of information coming to you have to be routed through several step-downs in available bandwidth. For most communities it is a good way to go but, more pointedly, it is the ONLY way for the community to provide bandwidth for itself. Unfortunately the constraints on providers, municipal and private, mean that you just plain don’t have the bandwidth for much beyond email and light browsing.

Lafayette isn’t in that situation. There is no need to go back to some big backbone through wireless jumps. There will be a huge chunk of fiber-based backbone running right down your street.

That is where all the really exciting stuff comes in.

A fiber-based wireless network could conceivably have NO jumps back to the backbone. It could be hung right off the backbone itself. It would not have to share bandwidth but could run at the full rated speed of the wireless equipment. (Something you seldom see. No wifi network in Lafayette outside, possibly, of directly fiber funded ones at ULL or LITE sees anything like the 54 megs of bandwidth that is speced out on the side of the box. Cox and BellSouth can’t give you that much bandwidth, so your can’t, for most practical purposes us the equipment at nearly that speed. We had one for a little while at our setup in the dome following Katrina/Rita. It was sweet. I liked it.)

With big, low-latency, bandwidth coming wirelessly off a fiber network vast new ranges of possibility arise. The first and most obvious is voice…voice over Internet Protocol, (VOIP) is practical, even easy. Just download Skype and go to it. Internet protocols don’t care what the packets are. If you get ’em fast enough you can easily use ’em for voice–without special network equipment. That’s where wifi/wimax enabled cell phones become a possibility. Just add the VOIP chipset and the chipset/radio needed for the radio bandwidth and your new “tri-band” or “quad band” cell phone is good to go…and as long as you stay in the city you can bypass those expensive cellular guys but still be able to hook in to them when you leave town. Seamlessly.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Funding the Wireless VOIP (WVOIP) dream are two necessities: big bandwidth and those Internet Protocols. The bandwidth makes new things possible and IP makes it simple to implement. Use your phone to wirelessly suck info from your home computer if you need it. Download the music parked on your online backup to your IPod via a nifty IPod add–do it from Mello Joy downtown–or the park. Reprogram your DVR from your laptop during the lunch break. Don’t just send your friends camera snaps…stream the video of your son’s turns at bat back to the mom who had to stay at work. If all that wireless is hung directly from the LUS network huge new possibilities like these emerge. Our wireless network could be qualitatively different from any in the country–much, much more advanced.

There are plenty of benefits for the city of Lafayette of having this all hung off LUS fiber and run by LUS. A wireless play there would both increase the take rate–more people would buy their package o services from LUS–and it would meant that the average subscriber would pay a little more as well. That means a system that more easily and quickly pays off its bond debt. That’s certainly in the interests of every citizen. But beyond that…that “little” more that the citizen would pay really would be or at least could “little.” What LUS will have to burn is bandwidth. It will cost them little to provide the bandwidth in-system. (Doubt that? Think again. How does Cingular afford those free in-system plans?) Such a system could provide wireless to wireless voice or data links between subscribers for just a small increment of the total bill. The cost of adding a wireless element to the fiber network would be, I believe, no more than 5% of the total investment. What percentage of your combined phone, internet, cable, and cell is your cell bill? More than 5%? I thought so. As a business decision it should be dead-easy for LUS. And the citizens it serves.

Speaking of those citizens: They’ll be some that worry about the political hassles that might result from the city taking such a visionary step. They shouldn’t. That battle, friends, has been fought and won. On July 16th. The people have asked for a strong, municipally-owned telecom network and winning over the citizens was the hard and essential battle. Giving them a good deal on yet another service or two is not going to distress them in the least. The opposition to our building our own system is already doing everything it can to stop us…and is failing. I doubt that there is anything they could try that they haven’t already tried. LUS is CLEC. It is already licensed to provide phone service. The coast is clear. There’s nothing to stop LUS from taking the wireless step but the approval of the city. The people gave their approval this summer.

You can see why I might think this the biggest story barely told. Lafayette would not only be the largest city in the country with a state-of-the-art fiber optic-based telecom system serving out big bandwidth that most could only envy. It would be in a position to serve the whole community with 1) big broadband wireless that is 2) completely integrated into and makes full use of the fiber optic grid the city owns. The combo of ubiquitous fiber and universal, big broadband wireless would be unique. And truly difficult for anyone, city or corporation, to match. Lafayette would be able to legitimately lay claim to being the most technologically advanced city in the country–and, as far as I can tell, the world.

That would be worth doing. Don’t you think?

Maybe it will be next year’s USA Today cover story.