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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TheSlowLane who wrote (12298)	10/5/2002 1:33:26 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 12823

At this point it is very difficult if not impossible to invest in wireless mesh. The companies that are targeting this area directly are privately funded and in this environment are unlikely to go public anytime soon. There has been, by my estimate, well over $200 million in venture capital invested in wireless mesh companies over the past three years. That's pretty amazing considering the shape of capital markets and pullback in overall VC funding. Major VC firms, including Silicon Valley Partners, Intel Venture group and others have invested in WMN. There are a few public companies that use WMN technology in their current products as a way to aide the ease of installation and use and extend the range and non line of sight capabilities but these efforts are so far not very inspiring because they are only useful with the individual company's proprietary products. At that, they have little chance of becoming used widely and therefore many of the advantages and momentum are lost. The vision for WMN is for widespread adoption so that a "wireless cloud" envelops densely populated areas and branches out to less populated areas and gathering places. It's possible for a new communications and computing "platform" to evolve based on WMN that spawns new categories or extensions of existing software. That can help to create an active user community and industry of developers. The software concept itself is pretty simple - thrashing it out into a useful set of programs that people will see as an advantage to adopt as a major effort. Some public companies using wireless mesh include Wi-Lan (Vines) and Alvarion and Speedcom (almost bankrupt). The impact of their efforts is limited. These companies do not have WMN products for open networks such as WLAN. Other wireless mesh companies include: www.meshnetworks.com www.communiquewireless.com www.station-server.com There are several "community wireless" group efforts. Most of these are for hackers only and I think will have little chance of becoming widely adopted unless and until they make the code idiot-easy to install and use. I think a commercial effort has a greater chance of success. The Locust World effort looks like the most promising so far. WMN efforts are coming up all over the globe: France, Russia, Taiwan, Canada, Great Britain and the U.S. There is also an effort under way to incorporate WMN from the packet level up into the upcoming IEEE 802.16a/b WMAN (Wireless Metro Area Network) standard. This should be much more robust and able to handle thousands of local users than is possible with 802.11 based developments. grouper.ieee.org