Wireless Cowboys

I have been digesting the discussions about open wifi access points and the recent Free Public Wifi debates that came up after Cecilia Kang’s Washington Post article and I think I finally came up with a good way to express my grave concerns with the idea.

The continued use of inexpensive fossil fuels leads to the unintended consequences of global warming and the degradation of our environment, and the same goes for the concept of free shared public wifi access.   Shared free access leads to an increase in utilization of network infrastructure with no economic benefit to the network provider.   I recognize that there are going to be situations where free wifi access is considered to be an economic benefit (McDonalds, Starbucks, etc) but in those situations the entity providing it would be reasonably expected to be purchasing a commercial grade connection in order to deliver that service.    One person with an open wifi connection on a residential account, sharing it with their neighbors, is taking potential customers away from the provider while increasing the oversubscription ratio of their network.   This will eventually lead to performance degradation, increased prices or both, so FREE is anything but.   Free public wifi is the equivalent of global warming on our broadband infrastructure.

A network operator has to face the massive increase in demand for bandwidth and pay the bills to upgrade infrastructure, while facing stagnant or declining revenues.    This is a daunting task to deal with already, so encouraging people to share their connections is more carbon based fuel thrown on the fire.

Nothing is free!

Craig Settles does a weekly show about broadband in America called Gigabit Nation.   I will be his guest this week, talking about the roles of fixed wireless ISPs in the broadband ecosystem.   The show starts at noon, EST.

Here is the link to the show   http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gigabitnation/2012/08/28/wisps-tips-for-better-engaging-these-broadband-stars

I look forward to the comments and discussion tomorrow!

One of my techs has been reporting for a long time that he has not been getting his full speeds and has had problems with his VOIP phone.   Last week, we mandated that the techs learn how to program a MIkrotik 751U router and sent one home with all of them to use.   Lo and behold, after moving his VOIP adapter/router from the front of the line to behind the router he started getting his full speeds and the VOIP started working better.    These are Linksys ATAs, and we have been using them with Ubiquiti AirMax radios.    He went from 3-5meg top speeds to 10-12meg (what he should be getting).

This was just the latest of many issues we have been seeing with customers using consumer grade routers, especially on the wireless interface.   Cannot tell you how many customers have been complaining about speed issues on 4meg+ plans that don’t exist when we test to the radio or to a laptop directly connected to the radio.

In one of the weird ironies of this business, we now have wireless last mile equipment that is capable of delivering speeds far faster than a lot of the existing consumer indoor routers (wired and wireless) can deliver to the last few yards.

Argh!

While Googling something else, I came across this message that I sent out to our nascent WISPA list right after my father passed away in January of 2004.   I thought it was worth sharing again…

Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to thank you guys for being
supportive on one really tough day.

We have had an overwhelming amount of support over
the last couple of days from our friends and family
and other people in our community.  In addition to being
a well-known businessman, dad spent a lot of time
volunteering at our county fair and being a good friend
to a lot of people.  His passing was the top news story
on the local radio station on Friday, which is a pretty
good indication of the impact he had on our community.

When I was living in a trailer house and driving a
$25 car back in 1997, my dad was one of the very few people
who believed in me and gave me the support I needed to start
my first ISP business.  I might be stuck in a dead-end job or
flipping burgers if it wasn't for the help that he offered
me.  The only thing that he didn't tolerate from a person
was not performing to the best of their ability.  One of
the last things he told me was "do your best and keep
getting after things" and I am going to do all I can to
fulfill his wishes.

Rather than sending flowers or anything like that, I would
ask that you keep alive the spirit of helping others. 
Volunteer some time to a cause that means something to you. 
If you have the ability, give an opportunity to someone who
could use a break.  The rewards that come back to you will
mean much more than the time that you spend.  I think
that the new WISPA efforts are going to pay back big rewards
to all of us and I'm going to volunteer a lot of my time to
that project - you guys can choose whatever works for you.

Best wishes to all of you, and I'll see you again in a couple
of days.

Do your best,

Matt Larsen

I have always had a lot of respect for David Isenberg and the ideals of the Freedom to Connect conference.    David was the first to widely promote the “stupid network” concept – networks that are little more than big, open pipes with a minimal amount of intermediate management applied to the flow of information.   David has also put on several of the Freedom to Connect conferences, a gathering of enlightened people looking for the best ways to make universal broadband access a reality.   I had the privilege of attending the 2006 F2C in Washington DC and spent the majority of the conference having my brain stretched in several different directions.   It was one of my first “near the Beltway” experiences – an opportunity to interact with academics, policy makers, politicians and deep thinkers.   As I look at the agenda for this year’s F2C, I am impressed by the number of quality participants that are going to be there.   But there is something very important missing and I can’t let it slip by.   The agenda shows speaker after speaker extolling the virtues of fiber powered community networks, but F2C has missed the boat on the most disruptive and cost effective competitive alternative to the cable/telco duopoly – fixed wireless utilizing unlicensed spectrum and the WISPs all over the world that are delivering broadband to their communities.

There is no disagreement from me that fiber everywhere is the ultimate connectivity goal.   But I have some very substantial disagreements with the timeline and economic costs to get there.   First of all, it takes a long time to build wireline networks of any kind – including fiber – and the construction of those networks is usually delayed at every corner by right-of-way negotiations, availability of materials, regulatory roadblocks and an insane amount of logistical issues.   While all of these things are holding up the deployment of the network, potential users are stuck with substandard or no broadband connectivity.   Second, fiber is EXPENSIVE (caps intended) and the economic model doesn’t work without substantial commitment from investors or a high percentage of government subsidization.   This high cost means that community-oriented and entrepreneurial smaller providers are usually kept out of the market.  The majority of fiber providers are either larger corporations that are prone to redlining and restrictive access policies, or government supported systems that put an undue strain on taxpayers through their dependence on subsidies or construction bonds.

I talked with several ISP operators about fiber during the ISPAmerica conference last month.   The universal conclusion from them is that fiber is just too expensive to deploy to the home in any kind of realistic (re: unsupported by outside revenue) business model.   One of the people I talked to was Dane Jasper, who has gotten a lot of attention for his deployment of gigabit fiber in Sebastopol, CA.   He agreed that fiber won’t cash flow on its own, and needs to be supplemented with a lot of copper to make a worthwhile business case.   None of the community network advocates has ever been able to show me a model where they could make the network stand on its own without a substantial amount of subsidization through taxes or government bonds.   And the fiber economic model really falls apart when you get outside of the dense urban environments and into suburban and rural areas.   The cost to deploy fiber in these areas goes up even while the number of potential customers goes down.

Fixed wireless on unlicensed spectrum has many important advantages in comparison to fiber:

1)       Fixed wireless is inexpensive.   The cost of building out fiber to the 700 homes in my rural hometown is estimated at somewhere between $800,000 and $1,000,000, which doesn’t include the ongoing maintenance and pole-attachment costs.   This cost also doesn’t account for the hundreds of homes outside of the city limits.    The cost to put up three fixed wireless clusters to serve the same set of homes – and all of the homes outside of the city limits – is about $15,000.   Ongoing operational costs are also lower because there are no pole-attachment rights.   If done right, wireless will PAY for the fiber deployment without taxpayer support or ongoing need for investor support.

2)      Fixed wireless can be deployed quickly.   Fiber networks take months of negotiation and require specialized equipment and workers before you even get into the field.  Field work is also very time-consuming and can be stalled out by weather.    A new wireless POP can be deployed within a week and tied to multiple new towers in the same time it takes a fiber crew to hook up a block of homes.   New unlicensed backhauls like the Ubiquiti AirFiber can extend gigabit speeds to any point within five miles that has clear line of sight back to the head end, bypassing the need for right-of-way.

3)      Fixed wireless is fast enough.   The newest generation of fixed wireless systems are far beyond DSL speeds and can keep up with cable.   Gigabit to the end user is not a reality and probably never will be due to spectrum constraints, but 20-30meg service to end users is possible and already being offered by many fixed wireless providers.    I live in a house five miles out in the country, with three laptops, two smartphones, two iPads, four workstations, an Internet-enabled TiVO and a Roku box.   10meg Internet service meets all of our current needs, so for all practical purposes the difference between 10meg and 100meg or 1gig is negligible.

4)      Fixed wireless is igniting a wave of innovation around the world.   Companies like Ubiquiti, Mikrotik and Cambium are coming up with incredible, low cost systems that are perfectly capable of delivering broadband performance in places where there is no wireline infrastructure or that infrastructure is not accessible.   Thousands of fixed wireless providers are bypassing telcos and cable operators to deliver broadband to otherwise unserved or underserved end users.   In several countries and regions around the world, fixed wireless is the most popular way to get broadband.

I am very disappointed to see Isenberg and F2C disregard the power and potential for disruptive change that fixed wireless represents.   However, I offer up a chance to make amends.   WISPA, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, will be conducting their advocacy day activities the week before F2C.   If Dr. Isenberg can make some space on the agenda, I’m sure that there are two or three very capable fixed wireless operators who would be interested in spreading the gospel of fixed wireless and WISPs to the F2C crowd.   If the goal of Freedom to Connect is to show the possibilities and solutions available now to help deliver universal connectivity, then fixed wireless networks and the community of WISP operators need to be part of the discussion.

Late last month, in their fourth quarter earnings call, AT&T basically said that they are going to stop expansion of their broadband footprint, especially in rural areas.    From the mouth of Randall L Stephenson, AT&T CEO:

…we have been apprehensive on moving, doing anything on rural access lines because the issue here is, do you have a broadband product for rural America?

We’ve all been trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America, and we’re not finding one to be quite candid. The best opportunity we have is LTE.

We are obviously excited about the opportunity to use LTE to get to rural America with the T-Mobile transaction.That having been set aside, now we’re looking at rural America and asking, what’s the broadband solution? We don’t have one right now.

Anyone who knows about the physics of mobile wireless knows that LTE is not going to be the savior in rural areas.   Apparently AT&T has finally figured that out as well.    Combine this with Stephenson’s earlier quote that referred to DSL as being “obsolete” and you can imagine how customers on AT&T’s landline networks with shoddy DSL or no broadband access are feeling right now.

Here is the message to AT&T from the 2000+ WISP operators around the US – “Don’t worry bro, we got this.”   Anytime, anywhere that the incumbent telcos or cable companies refuse to build out or step up their network performance, there will be a WISP there to do it for them.

Thanks for the customers AT&T!   Keep em coming!

Random thoughts about the WISP industry on a Friday:

The entire WISP industry is in many ways a giant collaborative project.   Many of the early WISP pioneers did not have any kind of background in RF or wireless communications.   The initial core of pioneers were independent ISPs that were disgusted with how the telcos were ruining the competitive environment and turned to fixed wireless as a possible alternative.   For the first two or three years, there were no real face-to-face meetings as the discussions took place on the old isp-wireless mailling list run by Jupiter Media.   In the spring of 2001, the first WISPCON in Chicago brought many of the mailling list members together in person for the first time and things really started to click.   I came back from that show with a completely different perspective on the WISP business.   Beforehand, I thought that it might be more like CB Radio redux (as unlicensed was often perceived at the time) than a real business, but after hearing from others that were making it work and seeing some of the equipment that was coming out (first glimpses of the Canopy platform and introduction to Mikrotik) I realized that we had a legit chance of surviving and thriving.

After that show, the relationships between the attendees were maintained online with occasional real-world gatherings.    There was constant experimentation by WISPs all over the world with equipment setups, business models and how to deal with competition.   Since very few WISPs were competing with one another, sharing was very open and honest.   We certainly had our share of know-it-alls and charlatans, but they followed Darwin’s path to irrelevance as the industry evolved.   WISPA was created in early 2004 and for several years it was almost entirely virtual.   The board held meetings online and the mailling lists contained the core of the interactions between members as the industry slowly gathered steam.     WISPCON died after five or six shows and didn’t really get replaced until WISPA put on its first trade show in summer 2010.   The trade shows are accelerating the collaboration, as some in-person contact is still extremely valuable when it comes to interacting with people.

A couple of points to throw out with regard to this discussion.

1)   Take a look at the last ten years of telecom and compare it with the last ten years of the WISP business.   Telecom has evolved into the price-gouging, anti-competitive, government pork-fed monster that we all love to hate.   4000-5000 WISPs sprang into existence with little or no government subsidies, delivered broadband to places that didn’t have it and competition to places that needed it and took advantage of technology that is now capable of delivering comparable or better services than the telcos.

2)  Defining characteristics of Telcos and WISPS:
Telcos = closed, anticompetitive, profit driven, dependent on subsidy, use regulation against competition
WISPS = open, competitive, service oriented, profitable without subsidy, work around regulation

3)  Collaboration was done without access to “ultra broadband” research networks or fancy systems – it was done through simple mailling lists and the building of interpersonal relationships.

4)  In-person meetings were critical to the development of the interpersonal relationships.   100gig broadband is no substitute.

Open networks and collaboration are the keys to progress in ICT.   100gig broadband is nearly worthless if it is a closed network.   Collaboration can be done without it.    Money will not fix our country’s broadband problems.

Have a great weekend!

Yesterday, I went on a trip to Alliance, Nebraska to help install our first customer on a new access point.   This is not something that I do on a regular basis, but this one was pretty special to me and I think that the circumstances around this install, and the work that went into making it possible is a great illustration of the power of broadband and how important WISPs are to the people that they serve.

First, I’d like to introduce you to Brian and Mary Lafler.   I have known Brian and Mary for a long time.

Brian and Mary Lafler

Brian was the long-time postmaster in Mitchell, Nebraska where I grew up.   I went to school with their daughters and their family was an integral part of the community.   Brian was also a musician, who played in a country/rock band called Wanted along with a few shows where he would play his own original music.

In December of 1996, I was working on a feedlot, driving a payloader and living in a trailer house.   My first venture into running my own business, doing video production, had failed and I had moved back to Nebraska from Colorado with a fair amount of debt, no job and no idea what I was going to do with my life.   While in Colorado, I had bought a bass guitar at a pawn shop and spent some of my free hours trying to learn how to play it.   I was about ready to take it back to a pawn shop and get rid of it when I got a phone call from Brian.   They needed a bass player for their band and he asked if I would like to come over and audition.   I went to his house for the audition and even though it was pretty clear that I was very green, the guys in the band liked my attitude and we started getting together so they could show me how to play their songs.   Brian was especially helpful to me, as he had started out on bass and even taped a little note on the neck of my guitar so I could figure out where the notes were.

A few months later, I joined the band on stage.     Our first gig was awesome and flawed and fun at the same time.   I only knew two sets worth of songs, but it was a four set show, and we got through the night.   Brian was yelling notes at me across the stage in the middle of songs trying to help me out, and I was nervous and not always getting it right – but he had a big smile on his face the whole time and you could see that they were all having a good time.    Most people learn how to play music through hours of practice and repetition.   I learned up on stage while simultaneously trying to keep up with three other musicians and entertain the audience.

For the next year and a half, I was the bass player for the Wanted band.   We played at county fairs, wedding dances, bars, American Legions, Eagles clubs and dance halls all over Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.   It was a great learning experience to hang around with the “pros” and I developed a love for playing music that continues to this day.    They money I made from playing music on the weekends was also a godsend as I was also struggling to get my first ISP business running at the same time.   Brian Lafler was not involved in my business, but he was a great friend and mentor at the time, and the confidence that he gave me as a musician helped me become a better person on stage, in business and in life.

Brian Lafler, Eric Meisner, Freddy Serta and Matt Larsen

After I left the band, I still stayed in touch with Brian and we later put together another band that focused on Brian’s original music along with our favorite blues and rock covers and played intermittently whenever we could find a gig and a drummer at the same time.   Brian and I have always had a great connection on the stage, and his soulful, beautifully crafted original songs always sound fresh and are a joy to play.   When my father passed away, Brian was one of the first people I called.   He played two of his original songs – “Feel Light Free” and “Take Up and Leave”  - at the funeral and they perfectly conveyed the moment.   I used to joke that Brian was “Bob Dylan in a postman’s uniform”, but as time went by, I think that turned out to be a lot truer than anyone would have imagined.

A few years ago, Brian and Mary moved to Alliance, 60 miles away.   We still maintained contact through email and occasional visits back and forth, but they left a little bit of a hole in Mitchell that still hasn’t been filled in.   Brian was able to focus on his new job as the postmaster in Alliance and they were able to spend more time with their grandsons who were a little further down the road in Hay Springs.

Three years ago, Brian was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.   The news hit me like a ton of bricks.   I had lost my father at a fairly young age, and the thought of losing someone who is like a second father to me was too much to bear at times.   I am in my forties now, and the spectre of death comes around more often than it used to.

After a few months of treatment at the Cancer Treatment Center of Chicago, Brian’s cancer appeared to be in remission.   We got up on stage for his daughter Paqui’s wedding the next summer full of relief and celebration.   It was a great feeling at the time and we even snuck in a few shows here and there over the next few months to relive some of the old times and make some new memories.

Unfortunately, the celebration was short lived and the cancer came back.   The chemo and radiation treatments have been very hard on Brian and the prognosis has not gotten better.    I was hoping that we might be able to make a trip to Memphis and record some of his songs in one of the old vintage studios down there, but it looks like that is probably not going to happen because the travel is too hard on him.

I had been feeling a little bit helpless and unable to do anything to make the situation better for Brian and Mary.   Then, a couple of weeks ago, Mary said something about the problems they were having with their Internet provider.   Brian and Mary live outside of the city limits in a rural housing development and had limited choices for broadband.      Skype would not work and downloading videos from Youtube or Facebook was an exercise in futility.   She was getting ready to sign up for WildBlue and have it installed.   I told her to wait a couple of weeks and let me see what I could figure out.

Up to this point, I had not seriously considered expanding our service to the Alliance area.   There are already two WISPs in the area, and people in the city limits already had seven broadband providers to choose from.    But if Brian and Mary were having problems, then there must be other people up there who need more competitive options.   There is a tower north of town that looked like it would work for us, so I made a phone call and lined it up.   On Tuesday of this week, I went up with our tower climber and we put up three sectors and a backhaul radio on the tower.   On Wednesday, we went to our nearest tower – 32 miles away – upgraded the main backhaul and put up a new one for the Alliance tower.   And on Thursday, I went to Alliance and hooked up Alliance customer #1 – Brian and Mary Lafler!

Brian and Mary on their new Internet Connection

It was a joy to watch them using Facebook and Youtube to look at music videos and knowing that Skype was going to be a viable option for people to call and not just do voice but also video.    Brian and Mary have friends all over the country, and daughters & grandkids an hour’s drive away, so being able to use Skype is a pretty valuable thing to them.

I am very happy that we were able to get service to Brian and Mary.    In addition to their neighborhood, the tower that we turned on can also see the towns of Alliance, Berea and Hemingford and a lot of the countryside around those towns – over 10,000 in population – and all of those people now have a competitive option that they didn’t have last week.    I was able to do this with no government subsidies and despite the fact that we had to build 75 miles of backhaul to get into the area.

Billions of dollars of government subsidies and USF revenue couldn’t bring reliable broadband to Brian and Mary Lafler.   But one WISP did.   It is nowhere near enough payback for all of the wonderful things that Brian and Mary have done for me, but I feel good about being able to do this for them.

To all my readers, thank you for reading and I hope that you have a happy holiday season!

I cut the satellite cord back in June, and after a few months I have no desire to go back.   The only things that I have missed have had to do with sports:   one Nebraska football game that was on the Versus network (although I did find a low-res online feed), the baseball playoffs (although I could watch the raw camera feeds through mlb.tv) and the world series.    I would like to point out that I did get a chance to watch the awesome Game 6 of the world series at a bar during a hunting trip and it is a lot more fun to watch sporting events with a group of people like that.   If you are a sports or reality TV junkie (ugh) – then you will probably want to keep your satellite or cable.   Otherwise, it is easy to do without and save a lot of money in the process.

We purchased at Tivo unit that has Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Youtube built in along with an over-the-air DVR, and it easily fulfills our entertainment needs.   We also put a Roku box in the TV in our bedroom and a media PC in the rec room and they have the same access to content as our main TV.   Our cost dropped from $120/month for our home (and my mother-in-law’s house, which is next door) to $26/month.   Our monthly bandwidth utilization is around 60-70Gigs, which is still under the bandwidth cap of the 8meg plan that we offer to our customers.

Netflix, Hulu and DVRs are changing the way that people watch TV.   Users are more empowered to find the content that they like and Netflix/Hulu do a good job of recommending other things that you might like.   I don’t think that the exclusive deals on some kinds of content are going to cripple Hulu/Netflix either.   Netflix could lose access to the newest movie titles and I wouldn’t care because there is still a ton of good stuff to watch.   Same with Hulu.   Some of the best stuff isn’t the junk that comes from network programming – it is the old movie collections (like the Criterion collection), old television series (original Battlestar Galactica for example) and the educational programming that is available.   I have a great time sitting down with my son to watch programs about space exploration and science, and then using the iPad to explore the same subjects on the Internet or through some of the amazing education apps available on it.   Having many of these content sources available on the iPad is a big winner too.   Our iPad is doing double duty as a second television that goes anywhere in the house or around the house, pulling in content from wifi and following us to wherever we happen to be.   Last summer, I started watching a baseball game on my desktop computer at work, listened to the audio feed on my smartphone as I drove home, put it on the iPad while I was outside weeding the garden and finally ended up watching extra innings on the big screen in the rec room on my media PC.

I believe that we are very close to reaching a tipping point on content.   The Internet TV model is great for consumers and death to the passively viewed, advertising filled, junk TV model that we have grown accustomed to.    I am much happier with a few channels of stuff I want to watch, when I want to watch it instead of having to sort through 500 channels of junk

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog lately, mostly because I have been busy working on a white paper for WISPA that covers the advantages of fixed wireless providers and the tremendous value that WISPs bring to our country.

I will be presenting on the paper today as the luncheon keynote speaker at WISPAPALOOZA, the WISP industry trade show in Las Vegas.     Friday I will be at the CITI “State of Telecom “Conference in New York City and then Monday at the Silicon Flatirons at CU Law School in Denver.

Here is a link to the paper.