>Nothing like rolling out a loss-leader to squash all those peskie
>"free" or non-telco services before rolling out "3G". Telco sponsored
>roll-outs of 802.11b will put it back where in belongs (solving the
>"ugly wires in the house" problem).
And who says that using WLAN at home and a PDA with VoIP as a
cordless phone does not have the potential to ignite a new market
segment ? Who says that this could not eventually spill over into
public places ?
Then again, with almost every company and many private households
running their own WLANs, to solve the ugly wires problem, who knows
what that might lead to when it is getting the attention of a
progressive administration or a big ISP.
For example, in many countries the electricity sector has been or is
about to be deregulated. In various places this involves that
electricity companies are forced to buy back electricity from end
users. For example, if you have solar panels on your roof in
California and at some point produce more electricity than you use,
your electricity company has to buy the surplus from you.
Now, imagine some place a government administration might just be
"crazy" enough to adapt this model in order to boost public Internet
availability. A country like NZ might be experiment minded enough to
regulate ISPs to buy back capacity on private WLANs. Then again, a
major ISP may not need regulatory incentive to go for it anyway. As a
result, public WLAN coverage in urban areas might turn out to become
nearly as good as that of cellular phone networks, but no entity
would own the network and no business plan would have ever been
written to obtain financing for it. Yet the network would be there
for everybody to use. For the avoidance of doubt, access services
would not be free of charge in this example, but very likely they'd
be very reasonably priced because most of the equipment would not
have been rolled out for the purpose of providing service and earning
a return.
It's a kind of WLAN sharing scheme "incentived" by regulation or
simply by opportunity.
Sure this would run into all kind of issues that would have to be
sorted out, such as interference, but I don't think that those could
not be overcome. Interconnect-micro-billing would be a challenge, but
again there is no reason why this could not be worked out.
Again, I am not saying this is going to happen in NZ nor elsewhere,
but it *could* happen almost any place and if it happens, it could
turn out to become successful and copied elsewhere.
kind regards
benjamin
[ Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Mon Aug 13 14:28:30 2001