In an effort to establish professionalism, I do try to not pimp my employer’s products or services. I’m an unabashed user of a product on a competitor’s network (iPhone) and try to make it clear that the content here represents my own opinions and not those of my employer. So I hope that you will maintain a level of respect for me and give me some objectivity points when I say that I have a new love: my Verizon Wireless MiFi. It’s a pocket-sized wifi hotspot for up to 5 devices that connects to the Verizon Wireless EV-DO 3G wireless broadband network. The device is manufactured by Novatel Wireless and is also sold by Sprint.
My Verizon Wireless MiFi, next to standard business card for size comparison.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time you have no doubt concluded that I am a gadget hound and tech nerd. Would it surprise you to learn that when I travel for business I usually travel with two laptops? It’s a sickness, I know. I’m a firm believer in keeping my work work on my work PC (an HP) and my personal material and projects on my MacBook Pro. In most hotels this has resulted in a life-or-death decision of which computer will be registered for the (usually expensive and slow) hotel broadband connection. In a few instances in the past I was able to use my Apple Airport Express to connect multiple devices to the hotel broadband. In those instances the connection is generally very slow, and often I find myself unable to use my VPN to connect to my work e-mail and other intranet resources. Bummer.
Even when I bite the bullet and decide that my work PC will be the sole digital link to the outside world performance is inconsistent. In my years of travel I have found it amazing how many times my VPN did not work. It still also amazes me how many hotels still treat broadband as an optional amenity. It’s not– a hotel room might as well not have electricity or running water. The net is central to how I and many others live our lives today and is non-negotiable if I am going to remain a productive employee while on the road. It also still amazed me the rates hotels charge for Internet connectivity: $12.95/day seems to be the standard. You don’t learn the VPN won’t function until after you’ve connected the work laptop and tried to connect. Want to cut bait and just use the personal machine? That’s another $12.50, please. Don’t even THINK of connecting your iPhone or other wifi-enabled smart phone (you can generally fall back on your usable if somewhat slow 3G connection there). Coffee shops and other hotspots also have spotty, inconsistent support for VPN connectivity. A lot of productivity has been lost struggling to get a VPN connection only to give up and just resign myself to days of catching up on e-mail and other tasks when next I am at home or in the office. To put it mildly, connectivity when traveling sucks.
I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Since I bought my MiFi I’ve had one day of meetings outside of the office and one business trip. On my day running around the Washington metro area I was able to use my down time to great productive effect The VPN works flawlessly every time. I can connect my PC, Macintosh and iPhone all to a blazing fast (in wireless terms) network with great coverage. On my recent business trip I did a speed check to find that I was getting 1097 Kbps down and 652 Kbps up. While it’s not as fast as my FiOS connection at home (I will limit myself to pimping one Verizon product in this post) it’s faster than most hotel broadband connections.
I’m not the only one who loves this devices and have made productive use of the MiFi. Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch and Bob Gourley of CTOVision have both sung the praises of their MiFis. Guy Kawasaki made a great post to the American Express OPEN for Small Business blog highlighting some valuable use cases for his Sprint MiFi, and some relevant to people who are not afflicted with my tech nerdery:
- In your hotel room
- Traveling with kids
- MacBook Air, iPhone and iPod Touch owners
- Smartphone users using VoIP such as Skype
- Making a sales pitch when you need a reliable and fast Internet connection
- Conference attendance (often wifi at a conference is either completely unavailable or an additional daily expense. Now you can even use the MiFi”s support for multiple connections to make friends and influence people).
- Speaking or presenting when you need an Internet connection (a requirement I can say with experience many venues are challenged to provide reliably)
- Alternative to tethering your computer with a mobile phone
One challenge I have had with the MiFi is maintaining a charge on the device. On my recent business trip I learned that my MiFi as well as a few other devices that charge via USB do not like my Belkin travel surge suppressor. This is a handy three-outlet surge suppressor that also has two USB ports to charge devices without the need for additional power adapters. This I think is a problem more of the Belkin than the MiFi, because my iPhone also would not take a charge from this device. So the one cautionary advice I would offer is that travelers should take the MiFi’s power adapter on the road with them just to be safe. The MiFi can be charged via USB from your computer, and I found this to be somewhat idiosyncratic and felt that the MiFI didn’t get the full charge it does when plugged in directly to an outlet.
Overall this is a device I strongly recommend. The retail price is competitive with standard 3G adapters for laptops (that only support connectivity for that single device). You barely have to travel more than once a month to make the $60 monthly price (5 Gigabytes cap) more cost-effective than paying for daily connectivity at hotels, in airports or coffee shops. The MiFi has already paid for itself this month and kept me happier and more productive in the bargain.
This past weekend there was a very active and exciting discussion on standards wars in my Strategic Management class. The specific standards war being discussed was the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. I was
very vocal (as I am known to be) that discussions of this standards war miss a much larger shift that is already underway. We are on the verge of moving away from content delivered via physical product towards a purely digital model. I was happy to see Forbes pay some attention to the specific companies and technologies leading this transition.
With Apple, Amazon.com, NetFlix and Microsoft pushing downloadable movies and cable and phone companies peddling a plethora of on-demand, high-definition content, the day is coming when the stacks of plain vanilla DVDs that clutter many home entertainment centers will go the way of the CD collection.
The increase in bandwidth and hard drive capacity in particular are brining us closer to a reality where all of our content comes down the pipe. I haven’t bought a CD in ages, and the only CDs I’ve bought in the last few years are for music that I was unable to find on any legitimate (or otherwise) digital store.
What trends could make me be wrong about this? For starters I could be drastically over-estimating the rate at which high-bandwidth penetration will reach the necessary tipping point. There’s also always the possibility that a “legacy” technology will continue to have takers within specific populations well into the future. People still use dial-up where there is no broadband or for redundancy. Portable CD players are still in use among groups that cannot afford the infrastructure one needs to use MP3 players (you need a computer and an MP3 player and sufficient computer literacy to use them together at the bare minimum).
Within the mainstream, though, I really do think the HD-DVD vs, Blu-Ray standards war is much less relevant than the video content standards wars that went before it.
Speaking of innovative delivery of connectivity to rural communities, Sprint yesterday made a very large announcement about an investment in WiMax. According to Reuters they will spend up to $3 billion, and I have heard reports of up to $4 billion in spending in this effort to build out nationwide wireless broadband by 2008.
“Imagine accessing YouTube.com and MySpace.com literally on the fly,” Sprint Chief Executive Gary Forsee told a news conference, referring to the popular online video and social networking sites.
Imagine that– a telecommunications executive not bitching about how people aren’t paying enough for his pipes but rather being delighted at the notion of delivering connectivity and value to customers.
Some commentators have questions the ability for Sprint to make a profit following such a capital investment, but I have to contrast this effort with some efforts to bypass the local exchange carriers in the past. Specifically I’m contrasting this $4 billion in capital investment to the around $100 billion pre-SBC AT&T spent to buy cable companies TCI and MediaOne in the late 1990s. At the time I actually thought AT&T’s strategy would pay off, and I think Wall Street unduly beat up on then AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong, forcing him to tear down this strategy. Thanks to the progressive march of technology Sprint will get to bypass the ILECs for around 4 percent of what AT&T once spent. If Sprint can market the service well I think they’ve got a good shot at making this profitable in short order.
Also, keep in neutral, Sprint. Stay classy, San Diego.
Tags: Sprint, WiMax
A few days ago I became a tad frustrated that Ive had no new real news about whats going on with the join acquisition of Adelphia (the local cable company and my broadband ISP) by Comcast and Time Warner. Part of the frustration arose from some recent DNS problems Adelphia seem to be having that are really slowing down my surfing. A friend of mine who works at a major ISP and I were speculating that the DNS problems are possibly due to DNS requests from subscribers computers infected with malware. We further speculated Adelphia might be holding off on buying new DNS servers to accommodate legitimate and illegitimate DNS requests because of the pending acquisition. So, through that long train of events and speculation I was left to wonder Whats the latest with this acquisition? Specifically I was curious as to whether or not it would be Comcast or Time Warner which would come to own the Adelphia franchise in Loudoun County, Virginia. So I did a search in Google News to see if there was anything.
I came across this piece from a website called the Loudoun Connection, a source Id never even known existed before now.
I was surprised to read the article and learn that one of the options the county government was considering was the possibility of purchasing the franchise from Adelphia. This is evidently an option that becomes an option for the government as a result of a county ordinance should the ownership of the company holding the franchise change hands.
Adelphia are claiming that the ordinance is not applicable as a result of their bankruptcy filing. This sounds like an interpretive stretch to me, and I fail to see the basis for Adelphias claim here. I know Im not a lawyer, but this smacks to me as another potential example of the abuse of bankruptcy protection as a management tool.
Even though the Adelphia claim has no merit I can see, the consideration that the county would take over ownership of the cable system as a public utility sounds like an awful option to me. Ever since moving to Loudoun Ive had the feeling that Adelphia is one step above a fly-by-night operation in terms of their infrastructure, customer service and product offerings. It took them forever to roll out broadband, their customer service (or lack thereof) makes it clear they have no real idea what theyre doing and the poor response to technical problems with broadband makes me wonder what their level of technical expertise must be. Since the news of the pending sale to Comcast and Time Warner Ive been counting the days until a company that can only improve our situation in Loudoun County takes ownership of the system.
I dont think the county government would improve the situation. Ive got a strong suspicion that the county doesnt know how to manage an Internet service, and I cant imagine the county being willing to make the investments which very clearly need to be made. The article I found goes back and forth as to whether or not the threat to buy back the system from Adelphia is a simply a tactic to raise the franchise fees or if the county is actually serious about taking over the system and turning cable television and broadband into a public utility. I sincerely hope its simply a negotiation tactic.
Om Malik has a story at Business 2.0 speculating on some of the reasons Google have been alleged to be buying high capacity dark fiber capacity from wholesale telecommunications providers. This comes several months after CNet published a speculative story about why Google were advertising for someone with experience negotiating with telecommunications companies. The complete list of job qualifications for said listing are as follows:
- Negotiations for collocation space in conventional data centers; for racks, power circuits, cross connects, and remote hands services in conventional data centers; and for wholesale transactions with conventional data centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
- Negotiation and purchasing of IP transit services in North America, Europe, Asia, and/or Latin America; negotiation of partnerships with Internet exchanges, regional peering providers, and paid peering arrangements with major carriers.
- Identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network; contracts and negotiation for managed metropolitan services and long haul wavelength services to fulfill capacity and redundancy requirements in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
- Identification and negotiation of contracts related to leases or purchases of data centers facilities and/or properties capable of conversion to data center purposes; experience with evaluating and assessing potential data center facilities for acquisition; experience negotiating startup, service, and maintenance contracts for data centers; experience obtaining data center infrastructure hardware including chillers, generators, UPS systems, transformers, power distribution units, etc.
My own telecom experience didn’t lead me to think too, too much of this at the time. The original job posting looks pretty standard for a company with heavy data hosting requirements that is going to need lots of hosting space and bandwidth capacity to support a data-intensive platform such as Google. Considering the volumes of information they’re dealing with, dark fiber seems like a perfectly cost-effective path to take. The per-unit cost of dark fiber is significantly less than leased capacity, but only the highest-volume customers can make it cost effective. Likewise, Google put so much information onto the Internet backbone, that they must pay a lot in interconnect charges. As Google begin to offer more and more high-bandwidth content such as audio and video, it would become a significant expense to their bottom line. Using dark fiber and effectively building their own Internet backbone would help them better control these costs.
Om speculates that one possibility is that Goolgle could build out a nationwide Wi-Fi network. This is the bit of his article which is likely to get the most attention. The business model would be a mix of subscription access and location-based advertising. I’m not sure dark fiber purchases lend themselves to this end, because there would be an awful lot of local access connectivity to individual Wi-Fi locations which would be required. However, Om may have better insider information than I: Business 2.0 has learned from telecom insiders that Google is already building such a network, though ostensibly for many reasons.
The Wi-Fi thing doesnt make sense to me. Wi-Max maybe. But I doubt Google would want to deal with all of the local access issues involved in a major Wi-Fi build out (dark fiber wont help you here) nor the negotiations with owners of the venues in which Wi-Fi would be made available.
A reason which makes much more sense to me, and that Om outlays in his article as well, is that taking a dark fiber approach helps Google eliminate the expense of putting large amounts of information onto ISP networks. Om writes:
An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month. Here’s why: Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP — say, Comcast (CMCSK) — which links up with Google’s servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase. Big networks owned by the likes of AT&T (T) get around transit fees by striking “peering” arrangements, in which the networks swap traffic and no money is exchanged. By cutting out middlemen like AboveNet, Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees.
This makes much more sense to me, and fits in better with Google’s current content-oriented strategy.
A new bill came to my attention following the latest This Week in Tech podcast. It seems that the replacement for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has been christened the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act. That link is to a .pdf summary, and John Dvorak also has some discussion on his blog. This bill is co-sponsored by John McCain, and this is the basis of some of my confusion, because McCain is also a sponsor of the Community Broadband Act of 2005.
From the latter bill:
No State statute, regulation, or other State legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such provider.
This bit seems to run counter to a section of the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act, as quoted here from the summary of the bill as linked:
A state or local government seeking to provide a communications service must give notice of and permit non-government entities to bid to provide such service preference is to be given to non-government entities. Existing government owned network offerings are grandfathered.
While the two clauses do not directly contradict one another, they seem to be in a somewhat different spirit. The former makes it clear that governments (most likely at the state level) will not prohibit municipalities from building their own communications infrastructure. The latter, while fine in concept, would likely open up an opportunity for commercial organizations to tie up community efforts in court battles. Hopefully the full text of the bill (I have not been able to find it as of yet) will address what constitutes a community having done their due diligence in giving commercial firms a right of first refusal.
In principal I do believe commercial organizations are better suited to provide communications services, and using tax dollars to fund the build-out of infrastructure is a gray area. However, with commercial companies such as the incumbent telcos and cable television providers picking and choosing the neighborhoods in which to build out advanced services, you cant help but encourage cities to build out their own offerings such as municipal Wi-Fi. However, if cities were to open up their rights of way, franchises and zoning in order to facilitate a more competitive last mile infrastructure build, they would make it easier for competing low-cost commercial firms to offer services in underserved areas. There is a certain degree to which the municipalities themselves create the problem they then must then try to solve.
Theres always the hope that Wi-Max will make this entire discussion irrelevant.
The Loudoun-Times Mirror in my home of Loudoun County, Virginia, has an article about homeowner complaints regarding the impact of Verizon’s fibre installations.
We should all probably expect to see more of this as FTTP buildouts progress. Ugly, ugly trenches dug along the front of each of our yards and residential streets torn assunder. Ah well… such is the price to pay for wicked fast broadband.
A few months back Verizon kicked up a lobbying storm in the Pennsylvania legislature when it came to be known that the city of Philadelphia were planning to build their own municipal Wi-Fi network. In a piece written for C|Net the CIO for the city shoots back. Whether you agree or disagree with her, this is a well-written, passionate piece.
I really think Verizon come out with some egg on their face in this one, and I say that as someone who is a strong advocate for free markets. City leaders in Philadelphia are struggling to a certain extent with economic development of their population, and the digital divide is a huge element of that development in today’s world. City leaders are right to step in and provide broadband infrastructure to their constituents when private companies either cannot or will not do it themselves. In this case Wi-Fi simply gives the city a cheap and easy way to provide basic infrastructure.
Verizon wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. We’ve seen incumbent carriers and cable companies refrain from deploying broadband facilities in locales where the market wasn’t there for a commercial service. They’re in business to make a profit for their shareholders, so that’s all fine and good. But the managers of the city are elected or appointed to serve even those people who are underserved by commercial services. If the taxpayers of Philly feel adequately served by these individuals, such that they’re re-elected to office, then that’s a vote of confidence that tax dollars are well spent on deploying broadband to serve under-served populations. Competing with commercial businesses may not be considered an appropriate use of tax dollars, but economic development certainly is. Its time telecommunications providers of all stripes (yes, this means YOU, too, Mr. Cable Company Guy) realized that the broadband services they deliver have quickly become necessary life blood for an information nation. Simply deciding an area is not economically viable for your service isnt the end of the concern for those who live there. If commercial leaders are not going to take on a roll, then what other choice do they leave municipal leaders? Once commercial operations walk away from an area, economic development becomes one of those externalities for which governments can and should be held responsible.
Verizon are showing that they’re missing the point on the value of broadband to customers who do pay for commercial services. Regarding free municipal Wi-Fi as a challenger to your commercial broadband offering is setting the bar REALLY low for your own service. Free Wi-Fi is, by its very nature, going to have spotty coverage, many points of congestion and a complete lack of security. Verizon and other providers have real competitive advantages over plain, muni Wi-Fi that should allow them to compete. Guaranteed levels of performance, reliability, security and bundled services such as e-mail are just a few competitive advantages commercial broadband will have. Verizon could even turn the situation around and to their advantage by offering value-added IPSec virtual private network (VPN) clients to their DSL subscribers in Philly so that they can use the muni Wi-Fi when they’re out and about with an added touch of security the general public won’t have.
