August 2007 Archives

Internet service provider EarthLink announced Tuesday a restructuring plan to cut costs. The plan includes cutting 900 jobs, and closing the company’s offices in Orlando, Florida; Knoxville, TN; Harrisburg, PA and San Francisco, CA. Further, the offices in Pasadena, CA and Atlanta, GA will be reduced in size.

 

So what does this have to do with wireless? In addition to its other operations, EarthLink has been involved in quite a few high-visibility municipal WiFi projects the past few years, including Philadelphia. The restructuring naturally raises the question: will EarthLink continue signing on to new muni WiFi projects?

 

In April, the company hinted that muni WiFi may not be a part of its future plans. At that time, EarthLink officials said they were evaluating muni WiFi projects it already was involved in (Philadelphia, New Orleans, two in California) to determine the profitability of such deals.

 

EarthLink’s CFO in April stressed that the company would see through the projects it had already sign on with, including the network in Houston, Texas. At the time the company was facing losses of $29.96 million for the first quarter of 2007. Since then second quarter 2007 results have been posted, showing net losses of $16.3 million.

 

I received an e-mail this morning from Craig Settles, a muni WiFi advocate and author of several books including Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless. Settles said EarthLink is slated to make another announcement today, and he won’t be surprised if it has to do with the company’s municipal WiFi business.

 

Settles said that, if EarthLink does bow out of the muni WiFi market, it will be in large part because most of these wireless networks have been built for consumer use—a potentially losing proposition since consumers are expensive to land as customer, and even more expensive to retain.

 

In his e-mail, Settles suggested that EarthLink could salvage its piece of the muni WiFi pie by repacking its wireless offering to target governments and businesses rather than consumers. This could help the company get a government, for example, to sign on as an anchor tenant, helping to guarantee the long-term financial viability of the network.

 

“Likewise they should develop an aggressive business-focused marketing campaign that capitalizes on a continually growing interest among small and medium sized businesses for mobile workforce applications,” Settles said in his e-mail.

 

Keep your eyes peeled today for more news from EarthLink—it just could be that the muni WiFi project in your city could hang in the balance.

INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007 is less than a month away. (The event this year is being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, Sept. 10-12, 2007.) If you haven’t registered yet, here’s a plug: this show is not just about IP communications. It’s about wireless, too.

 

Here are a few of the wireless-related companies that will be at the show.

 

a la Mobile – makes Linux-based platforms for mobile handsets. Chief Technology Officer David Rivas will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

Airwide Solutions – makes mobile messaging infrastructure products and applications. Chief Technology Officer Vincent Kadar will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

EarthLink Wi-Fi Phone – a service that includes a Wi-Fi-enabled handset and connectivity. Director David Elgas will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

Kineto Wireless – developer of unlicensed mobile access (UMA) technology for fixed-mobile convergence. Associate Vice President of Marketing Steve Shaw will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

MobiTV – develops technology that lets users watch live TV on their cell phones, anywhere. Chief Technology Officer Kay Johansson will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

MOBIVOX – provides cheap international calls from mobile phones, with or without Skype. CEO Stephane Marceau will be speaking. (Session info here.)

 

That whetted your appetite? Register for ITEXPO here. Then, while you're waiting for the show to start, check out this list of recommended sessions to attend.

Craig Settles (author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless and other books on similar topics), who keeps me updated regularly regarding U.S. municipal WiFi projects, wrote the other day to highlight how an only partially-complete WiFi network helped Minneapolis emergency responders deal with the recent Interstate 35W bridge collapse.

 

As you probably know, during evening rush-hour on August 1, the eight-lane interstate bridge portion of I-35 over the Mississippi River collapsed, dropping vehicles about 60 feet into the water below.

 

Ironically, Settles in May completed a report about how municipal WiFi networks can help cities cope with disasters. Following the Minneapolis bridge collapse, he appended his report to include background on this specific disaster as a case study.

 

The addendum is available for download here. Full report is here.

 

Despite the fact that the Minneapolis network, being built by vendor USI Wireless, was only one-quarter complete when the bridge collapse occurred, it nonetheless came in handy for emergency responders.

 

Settles interviewed Minneapolis’ CIO, Lynn Willenbring and USI Wireless CEO Joe Caldwell to learn about the emergency-response aspects of the network. One way it helped was to make more bandwidth available for citizens and officials to get in touch with one another. Caldwell tried to reach city officials, but couldn’t get through because of overloaded cellular equipment; this prompted him to make access of the entire WiFi network built out so far free for 24 hours. This let people with WiFi-enabled phones call each other; people also got in touch using instant messaging, video, photos and e-mail.

 

Another way the network helped was by providing a means to distribute maps of the disaster site to city staff so they could more efficiently perform traffic and recovery efforts.

 

“While municipal wireless has given people some things to be critical about, Wireless Minneapolis' role in the emergency response to last week's bridge disaster proves the technology's potential to save lives across America,” Settles wrote in his message to me.  “It also shows that one answer to the national debate on how to enable different agencies to have interoperable communication during a crisis.”

 

Clearly, WiFi does not have to be just a convenient service; it can also save lives. The Minneapolis bridge collapse is a good case study.

Running away to the circus no longer means running way from modern technology. Wireless mesh networks developer Firetide said Tuesday that its portable network solution is now being used by Ray Cammack Shows (RCS), a North American carnival midway company.

 

Carnivals put on by RCS get 9 million visitors annually. Maintaining the necessary business environment to serve all those people, while moving frequently from site to site, used to be a challenge. No longer. Now the company can use Firetide’s technology to set up a mobile, wireless environment wherever it goes that’s capable of supporting all business functions—including real-time e-ticketing, inventory management and time card tracking for more than 500 employees.

 

In 2006, RCS launched an initiative to operate more efficiently, and have a lighter environmental impact on the places it visits, by going completely “digital.” The company also hoped that the initiative would help it combat ticket fraud and optimize inventory/personnel management.

 

In order to achieve these lofty goals, RCS needed a secure, rapidly-deployable wireless infrastructure capable of operating in any environment the company’s IT team might face. Only Firetide offered the necessary technology.

 

“Without Firetide's reliable, high-performance wireless backbone, it would have been impossible to migrate the entire IT infrastructure to wireless and achieve our business goals,” said Bil Lowry, director of IT and marketing technologies at RCS, in a statement.

 

At the company’s largest event this year, the Orange County Fair, the Firetide system performed “exceptionally well,” Lowry said. Next year, the company now plans to add IP video surveillance to the system.

 

RCS defines itself as a “self-contained, mobile entertainment company.” It hauls with it all the equipment needed to assemble and disassemble an entire midway—equipment hauled by a fleet of more than 80 trucks. The company’s infrastructure now includes 46 Firetide nodes, 35 access points, and more than 300 handheld cordless scanners and POS terminals.

 

The scanners are used to conduct ticket redemptions, time card logs and inventory checks from each booth. This information is beamed wirelessly in real time to an operations center.

 

“By deploying a complete wireless infrastructure with the Firetide backbone, RCS is revolutionizing the centuries old carnival entertainment business to provide customers with enhanced service and increased security,” said Bo Larsson, Firetide’s CEO, in a statement.

 

Lowry said the entire Firetide network can be deployed in 12 hours and disassembled in two hours. The technology works in extremely varied climates, including the heat of Phoenix and the humidity of Houston. Further, because it uses 5 GHz spectrum, interference from WiFi devices (which operate at 2.5 GHz) is minimized.

 

Pretty cool stuff.