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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (18870)	1/12/2007 7:01:30 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

I'm glad you brought the issue of municipal/government owned fiber. I have run into this in discussions with government officials and contractors in Seattle, San Francisco, and several other cities including a few in Europe. I wrote an article on municipal wireless about a year ago that is on the WiMAXtrends.com website. This pointed out that a major strategic issue of the recent muni-fi contracts awarded in San Francisco, Chicago, etc. is that these are long term (San Francisco was scaled back to 2+2 years from 10+2) and give the operators expedited access to the government owned fiber. In several cities the city and county governments put provisions into their cable and some other utility contracts and contracted separately for several strands of fiber to be run along many of the hundreds of miles of cable runs. In Seattle there are five, 7 or more fibers running through many areas. Fiber runs into the suburbs, even to local fire stations and schools. A typical fire station may make use of one fiber optic... the four or more dark fibers have never been used. A map of these fiber runs for Seattle and many other cities shows runs within about 1/4 mile of most residents. In some areas, like where I am located in N. Seattle, it may be 1-2 miles to the nearest fiber run. In any case, this is a huge, largely untapped resource. WiMAX or other next generation wireless system can provide high bandwidth per user if the fan-out is low, the back haul sufficient, and the cost is low. The largest part of the cost of broadband is the development and operations cost, not the equipment. Equipment amounts to 15%-25% of the deployment and operating costs. Less when you ad in the marketing and customer service costs. Chip and equipment development is now occurring for network enabled fempto, pico, micro, & mini base stations and MMR relay stations as previously mentioned. These could be built into or mount onto lamp posts and other convenient municipality owned locations. Otherwise, building a network using base stations scaled meet the demand and deployment environment allows achieving higher bandwidth at lower cost than traditional cellular systems. This is a major reason why WiFi MESH is much cheaper than deploying a cellular network: the site acquisition costs are lower and the local government cooperates to make permitting and access available. WiMAX or the 'granular' approach to network deployments lowers the costs. WiMAX and WiFi do not require special power conditioning. WiMAX is a managed network similar to a cellular system and should be well planned and fine turned for coverage and performance, but it is similar to WiFi in the way it can be deployed. What will be different is that WiMAX networking is being standardized from the ground up to assure compatibility.