Tuesday, June 5, 2007

How real are the promises?

One has been hearing often and more about "Municipal WiFi". This has been in attempt globally, I remember the original instances of Google & Earthlink trying to WiFi up all of Milpitas. However, after the initial euphoria of articles, the news in general began to get darker and less optimistic.

Summarizing this article, it would appear that the following are the primary reasons for the "failure" of Muni WiFi

a) Underestimation of the number of nodes required to provide a competitive & comparable experience to customers for browsing the internet; resulting in flawed capex models

b) Overestimation of the power of networks, thus resulting in the inability of the "waves" to penetrate the walls of places resulting in the customers needing to buy fancier and more expensive CPE, again resulting in the business model getting flawed with reduced adoption rates

c) With lower customers come fewer advertisers and hence lesser revenue to offset the costs...

And now the complete business model so far stands wiped out. Rather early pessimism too! Still, cities & states in India too are coming with their EOI's for Muni WiFi... what happens, time

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