(I recently did an email interview of Carlos Rios a vendor that participated in the San Francisco TechConnect WiFi franchise initiative, Here are his predictions about what actual coverage people can expect and what he believes happened in the RFP, Also how he says his solution combined with Earthlink will provide good outdoor and indoor universal coverage and protect privacy - Kimo)
Thursday, April 8, 2006
KC: You recently stated that "Google bailed out on San Francisco". Explain.
CR: In my personal opinion Google's bold vision for a free San Francisco wireless network was derailed by a sad combination of not-up-to-the-task technology and only-in-San-Francisco politics...
Remember that Google shocked the world last fall with their TechConnect RFI/C proposal for Free San Francisco WiFi. However, it was lost on many that the proposed GoogleWiFi Network would only serve perhaps 1 in 5 San Franciscans (the widely separated WiFi Mesh nodes could only provide at most 30% outdoor and 10% indoor coverage, for an effective overall 20%) and did not address other issues of profound community concern.
So after hearing an earful from Users, ISPs, vendors and community groups, San Francisco wisely released an RFP soliciting the only politically tenable citywide wireless Internet solution, the "Free WiFi for everyone with a secure, private, open, neutral and disaster tolerant Network". And support for community Digital Inclusion programs.
Unfortunately, this was much, much more than Google had bargained for. Meeting the new 95% outdoor/ 90% indoor coverage requirements meant at least quadrupling the number of proposed outdoor WiFi nodes PLUS dealing with the screaming nightmare of negotiating indoor equipment "rights of way" with individual landlords and property owners throughout the City. And all this just to experiment with interactive local advertising. Google didn't get to be a $120B company by throwing big bucks down "grand experiment" ratholes. So, the stage was set for crafting the current proposal where EarthLink deploys a similar (For-Pay WiFi for All-Those-Close-Enough-to-a-Node) 20% coverage Network and Google foots the bill for the free services.
Nobody wins here, except the lucky 1 in 5 near a mesh node. San Francisco would get a network that's certainly affordable but not even close to universal, and with little if any Digital Inclusion funding. City Hall would have to deal with the unhappy 80% of San Franciscans who WON’T get their promised Free WiFi. EarthLink would merely recover its Network deployment and operating costs. And Google would get a very poor interactive advertising testbed (Why would a local merchant advertise in a medium that could reach at most 20% of his potential customers? Me, I'd stick with ValPak)
KC: You say that nextWLAN's (fourth-ranked of six) "MicroNode" proposal would do EVERYTHING you claim Earthlink and Google can't do. What do you mean?
CR: I'm actually advocating a combined WiFi Mesh and MicroNode solution for San Francisco. nextWLAN's MicroNode CPE enables "indoor networks that penetrate outside" with about 70% outdoor and 95% indoor coverage, yielding an effective overall 90%. So MicroNodes perfectly complement standard WiFi Mesh "outdoor networks that penetrate inside" that unfortunately only provide 30% outdoor and 10% indoor coverage, or an effective 20%. But a combined EarthLink outdoor Mesh and nextWLAN indoor MicroNode network will provide the required San Francisco 95/ 90% everyone, everywhere coverage.
A subscriber's Free WiFi is paid for by his use of private Pay-per-Click-subsidized local search. All WiFi sessions are secure from surveillance via SSL-encryption upon login. The inherently open and neutral MicroNode Networks are freely available to any interested content, application or Service Provider. Subscribers truly concerned about disaster tolerance are encouraged to procure inexpensive UPS devices for their computers, MicroNodes and DSL modems in order to remain online for those critical first hours after the Big One hits. And finally, the economics of MicroNode Networks uniquely support Network Operator revenue streams fully supportive of significant community Digital Inclusion funding.
Here's how it all works: An SFWiFi subscriber gets free 384kbps wireless Internet in exchange for his e-patronizing neighborhood merchants via the nextWLAN portal (think Yahoo! or Google Local Search, with the very cool maps automatically centered on the User's precise street location). So if said User had, say, unfortunately forgotten the honey's birthday today, a quick search for "florists" on our portal yields a list of all neighborhood flower purveyors as well as their precise location and distance on the map, and perhaps even an e-coupon or a phone icon for an immediate VoWiFi order.
Try here:
https://www.lanroamer.com:10001/cgi-bin/login.cgi?wired_if=eth0_0060b31388cf
nextWLAN will engage with a “Primary Advertising Aggregator” such as Google so that any User click-through to a PAA local merchant client yields us a Pay-per-Click royalty (usually between $0.10 and $0.25 per click). The compelling nature of the MicroNode solution resides in nextWLAN’s unique ability (thanks to our 90% coverage) to deliver a cityful (400k?) of neighborhood Free WiFi Users to a cityful (80k?) of local merchants, funneled exclusively through the PAA.
The MicroNode economics are also uniquely compelling in that the ultimate SFWiFi business metric is the so-called "cost to provide Free WiFi". For MicroNodes that metric runs to about $2/month per User. So the fundamental business proposition boils down to how many $0.15 local search User clicks are required for us to exceed breakeven- and an average of just 1 click per User per day yields enough revenue to cover our $2/mo per User operating costs AND to donate, say, $1/month per User to City Digital Inclusion programs. At 400k Users, that's nearly $5M per year for Digital Inclusion- much, much more than EarthLink offered much larger Philadelphia with its for-pay Network.
KC: But Earthlink-Google would employ the identical interactive local advertising mechanisms, so why is nextWLAN's solution better than theirs?
CR: I estimate the corresponding EarthLink WiFi Mesh cost-to-provide-free-WiFi to be over $10/month, or 5 times nextWLAN's. Google is on the hook to pay EarthLink for it, sure, but it's VERY unlikely they'll ever generate the amount of User clickthroughs for breakeven given the much higher cost bar and the much smaller (thanks to their 20% coverage) client merchant base. So an EarthLink-only San Francisco Network could well be a failed experiment in interactive local advertising for Google from the get-go.
KC: You recently offered to unwire San Francisco City Hall in a pilot demonstration of your technology- but now that EarthLink has been selected isn’t that like bolting the barn door after the horse got out?
CR: The proposed City Hall pilot was completely independent of our TechConnect Proposal. The nextWLAN solution is really a better new, different and complementary municipal wireless mousetrap, but what I've observed over the last couple months of attempting to evangelize MicroNodes is that neither host Cities, Network Operators, Users nor community groups fully understand how they work from a technical, operational or business perspective. So the pushback has been incredible. All we're trying to do with SF City Hall, as well as simultaneously in a homeless transitional housing apartment complex elsewhere in town, is to demonstrate fully TechConnect compliant and commercially viable muni WiFi under the most challenging circumstances possible, to wit, comprehensive well-indoors coverage supporting consistently very high User demand.