A (Very Premature) Post Mortem Look at Citywide WiFi
Marshall Brown | WiredTowns | October 9, 2010
[Eric M. Fraser], a lawyer by training, has written a thoughtful but in my view incomplete analysis of municipal Wi-Fi and why it failed to live up to its promise entitled A Post Mortem Look at Citywide Wi-Fi: bit.ly
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So far so good. All this is true. But this has meant that engineers have had to continue their innovations. 802.11n, MIMO, beam forming, and other technologies are improving Wi-Fi network performance. More mature monitoring and management systems, are improving Wi-Fi networking performance dramatically. Contrary to Mr. Fraser’s claim that outdoor networks need access points every hundred feet. I am at least 500 feet from an access point and doing fine. My networks in Times Square and Union Square NYC operate in some of the toughest RF environments imaginable, yet people are able to connect from 500 feet away. So much for that claim.
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Mr. Fraser offers that Wi-Fi does have limited local use in libraries and in remote rural areas that have no alternative, but that 3G and LTE (provided of course by your friendly neighborhood telcos) is the preferred way to access the Internet. This point of view is difficult to square with the fact that, faced with 130% CAGR growth in mobile data use over the next five years at least, telecoms the world over are desperately trying to offload that data traffic onto Wi-Fi networks, for without that their cellular networks will be overwhelmed.
Complete: wiredtowns.com
fac: Marshall has included some interesting side information in this article behind embedded links, e.g., the Altai A8 Super WiFi Base Station at bit.ly ; as for the original post mortem, one might have overlooked its short-sightedness three or four years ago, but today even the majors are leveraging WiFi's capabilities in the densest of urban situations ...
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