The Orchestra Master: We’re unemployed, then.
The Presenter: Unemployed…until the next movie. I’ve already got an idea.
— Allegro Non Troppo (Not So Fast!)
EarthLink spent $16 million to build a wireless Internet “cloud” over Philadelphia, but couldn’t generate a profit with only 6,000 subscribers.
Network Acquisition Company announced last week their intentions to form a for-profit company that will provide both wired and wireless services to universities, hospitals and businesses. The local investors include Tom Knox, a former mayoral candidate, Mark Rupp and Derek Pew, the director and CEO, respectively, of Boathouse Communications Partners, and Rick Rasansky, the Chairman and CEO of eCal, a company that provides online business collaboration services.
Now two industry leaders have stepped forward to ensure that the new business and design models will succeed where EarthLink’s failed, reports the Philadelphia Bulletin.
Karl Garcia, a software engineer with Google, traveled to Philadelphia last week to announce his company’s support of technical know-how for designing the wireless system. Garcia oversees the WiFi network in Mountain View, Calif., Google’s headquarters on the outskirts of San Jose.
If successful, Philadelphia will have the biggest free WiFi network in the country. “If you learn from our experience it will take you less time to get there,” Mr. Garcia said. The Mountain View WiFi network has roughly 15,000 users per month, almost half of the adult population.
The other industry leader is investor David Hanna, the board chairman of Tropos Networks, the company that manufactured the wireless nodes installed in the Philadelphia WiFi network. “I’m an industry pioneer when it comes to metropolitan WiFi business models,” said he. Tropos has supplied wireless nodes to roughly 350 municipalities in America.
Mr. Hanna is the only investor not from Philadelphia. He’s also widely known as the son of William Hanna, the co-founder of cartoon studio Hanna-Barbera.
So why did EarthLink fail?
According to Mr. Hanna, it attempted to provide an indoor-use service and compete with DSL and cable broadband, something the WiFi technology cannot replace in both price and quality.
“It didn’t fail technically. It wasn’t the technology. It was that the incumbent [wired] Internet services were so cheap they couldn’t price under that,” Mr. Hanna said.
Mr. Garcia added that the Tropos nodes in the wireless network were worth saving because the Mountain View system uses exactly the same product, “I think it’s a very well engineered product. We’re very happy with it.”
Mountain View uses some 400 Tropos routers covering 12 square miles, or about 35 to 40 routers per square mile. That sounds like a (now standard) $100K+ per sq mile install, or $1.2 million.
One in six access points is an Alvarion gateway. There are also three bandwidth aggregation points connected to the GooglePlex using point-to-point gear from GigaBeam, an equipment vendor of licensed 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz radios.
Hanna and the other investors are picking up Philadelphia’s $17 million city-wide network at virtually no cost and saving face for Tropos. Running it might be another story.
Of course Wi-Fi city clouds will have to compete with Mobile WiMAX.
Portland, Oregon will have some 300 Mobile WiMAX cell sites by launch time toward the end of the year. [Note: Dailywireless tried out Motorola's CPEi 150 today but couldn't connect at a location near the airport]. A “couple hundred” beta customers are currently on the network. After Portland, Baltimore, Washington DC and Chicago launch this year, Clearwire will deploy mobile WiMax in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Rich MacKinnon, who built up Austin Wireless to a community of nearly 100,000 users says, “In order for a city to ethically encourage neighbor-to-neighbor sharing, it needs to identify neighborhoods that are under-served and identify broadband-enabled neighbors within that area or in neighboring areas.”
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