WiFi – Page 3 – Steve Blum's Blog

Mesh WiFi coverage depends on what you mean by coverage

7 July 2011 by Steve Blum
community networks, meraki, municipal wireless, WiFi, WISP

WiFi is great as the last link between the network and the user. It’s high enough bandwidth that it’s not a bottleneck, people know to look for it and the available hardware and clients are well advanced. Consumers will pay for casual access, but in that case they expect performance. They love free WiFi and will put up with a surprising amount of hassle to access it. Companies like Meraki have made it very cheap and easy to get a “drinking fountain”, amenity grade WiFi service up and running, on a paid or free basis.… More

A brief postmortem on the wireless Internet utility

14 November 2008 by Steve Blum
arpu, Barcelona, churn, community networks, municipal wireless, operating cost, subscriber acquisition cost, WiFi, wireless broadband business model, WISP

Nearly all of the city-scale, mainly WiFi-based wireless ISPs of the past three years are dead. Some, like Philadelphia, lumber on as zombie ventures. A few small town systems will continue to operate as long as the social and political consensus supports the subsidy required. And there are a couple of big city projects that haven’t burned through their initial operating capital yet.

But the rest are dead. The disease that killed them was cash flow hemorrhage, brought on by virulent churn.… More