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To: carranza2 who wrote (130081)	7/9/2003 6:45:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Well, most people gave my CDMA hopes the kiss of death in the early 1990s too. They still think Globalstar was a lemon from the beginning, but I'm working on that. I have spent a lot of days figuring out WiFi and I don't see a show stopper for WiFi networks. WiFi can do it faster, better and cheaper and consumer devices will come with the electronics ready to go. That's not a bad combination. Apart from 'there's no business case' which is an assertion, not a reasoning process, why do you think WiFi won't be a successful business in areas of several square kilometres? At Auckland University, there are about 30,000 students. Those are nearly all high value people with enough money and brains to be able to pay for and who need cyberspace access. [Even if they have to borrow the money - impoverished students would disagree] The whole university [two campuses] and Albert Park could be covered for a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on how much rent the university wanted. Now the guesswork. If 3000 of them decided they'd like WiFi service and paid $10 a month, that would be $300,000 per year. The university would probably let them have cheap data access, as they do at present. RoamAD wouldn't need to charge much more on top of the university data charge. Maybe 10c a megabyte. People would use something like 100 megabytes a month [I use a gigabyte on my home WiFi and mainframe system]. That would be another $10 a month for a total of $20 a month or $600,000 a year. But I expect that all 30,000 of them would use the service [by 2010]. So the charges could be $5 a month and whatever the university charges plus 3c a megabyte. That would bring in $1,500,000 a year in monthly fees - say only $1m because they aren't there all the time -holidays and stuff [but staff are there a lot and they'd buy it too]. Plus the megabyte charge of 3c, or maybe 2c or 1c would bring in at least 30,000 x 100 x $0.01 [at 1c]/month = $300,000 per year. It looks like a business case to me. Sure, there's a bit of fine tuning needed. Plus product sales and what have you. Advertizing. Mqurice