Or at least you are probably in better shape than the prospects for the municipal mesh WiFi market right now. Once feted as a glorious new frontier in wireless, now mesh is busy getting its ears boxed.
The latest project to come in for a roasting is the high-falutin' plan to blanket Silicon Valley with mesh coverage. Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and others launched the project to cover up to 2.4 million users in September 2006. (See Cisco & Pals to Unwire Silicon Valley.)
Now the project is on the ropes, according to San Jose's Mercury News:
"We're prepared to scrap the whole project," Russ Hancock, CEO of the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, which organized the effort, tells the paper. "We're having a caucus now to see how we can still move forward."
Ouch!
Still, here's the best of the rest:
- VOIP & WiMax
Will you be able to talk it up over 802.16?
- WiMax on the Nile
Surf like an Egyptian.
- Peer-to-Peer Cellphones No, not just a couple of tin cans and some string, evidently.
There are many grand schemes to deliver incredible Web 2.0 services across the internet, that current telecom networks do not have the capacity to deliver to everybody.
A new business model is needed for seamless digital cities, that is free, secure and fully interactive to users everywhere, paid for by someone else.
If you deploy lots of WiFi/WiMax transceivers at street level across a community, you will get a digital city, but someone has to pay. It is possible to embed cached RAM and flash memory in every one of those transceivers at the physical edge of the network (closest to the end user). Local enterprises can store interactive adverts for their products and services in the nearest transceiver RAM memory. This allows local consumers to GÇ£harvestGÇ¥ the products and services of nearby businesses and community information through a free wireless access point at the very moment of decision without Google. Users could also have free access the internet for any purpose and via the internet, could also pull interactive local information and services stored in transceivers in distant areas, all paid for by advertisers.
Using the locally generated content stored in the transceiver RAM memory, the local internet is delivered globally and the global internet is delivered via free WiFi/WiMax into the users hand.
Virtually live stream IPTV and VoD can be enabled by caching content in flash memory embedded in the transceiver right at the edge of the network. Video or other download content, pulled from a remote data source would be buffered in the flash memory embedded in the transceiver. This enables instant delivery of the first bit of the content you want to use or watch, while the rest is being downloaded. This means that you no longer need to download the whole file into your computer, set top box, MP3 player or any other wireless handheld device before being allowed to start processing or viewing. The smart transceivers can transfer the flash cache allowing users to wander as they watch.
The transceivers could broadcast to any WiFi/WiMax computer, laptop or handheld device allowing enterprises and organisations to capture the local or remote business opportunities at the very moment of interest. This is the advantage over existing muni-WiFi networks, as advertisers pay for deployment and users have significantly improved free, roving high capacity, secure internet connectivity with fully interactive services. This offers an aggregated content delivery system for all media distribution to end users in all environments. This new GÇ£requested local advertisingGÇ¥ or GÇ£permission based advertisingGÇ¥ business model can pay for digital city deployment in months, not years.
People will come to accept the GÇ£fair exchangeGÇ¥ of focussed and targeted advertising paying for digital city deployment and free delivery of some Web 2.0 services. If people donGÇÖt want adverts, they will be paying for the service.
Web 2.0 exists today, but until the last mile capacity constraint is cost-effectively solved, there is no way to deliver it to everyone, all the time.