The City Wireless War

I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic, and in a previous video whiteboard, we talked about the use of mesh networks to provide city wireless access, and now we're going to talk about the war about city wireless networks and about how there are different competing camps, both pro and con, the idea of a city using mesh networks to provide Internet access to its own citizens.

So, I mentioned there's a war, and in most wars there's two camps. There's the pro side and the con side. The first on the pro side would be the cities themselves, and their argument goes something like this: "Look, we want to give wireless access to our cities. Cable companies and telecom providers, they often don't want to come, they think our city isn't big enough, or the service could be lucrative enough, or the service is just pretty shoddy, so we're going to provide access to our citizens themselves, we're going to install mesh networks and we're going to provide access to our citizens, and what can possibly be wrong with that?"

Here's another group: hardware manufacturers. Companies like Intel or Nortel, they provide chips and chipsets, and they actually would build the mesh networking equipment that cities would buy. Software companies, Microsoft, for example, as you might imagine, has devoted a lot of research to mesh networks, and they're very interested in any deployment which increases the use of software to provide mesh networking, and consumer groups, many consumer groups, not all, and their argument is, "look, we're being gouged by the cable companies and by the telecom providers, let's look to cities to this at a low cost, we want better service, we want more reliable service."

Who's on the other side? Well, the cable companies, for one. What's their argument? They say, "look, you provide a regulatory environment, you control who can provide service to your citizens, and now you're going to turn around and compete with us and change the rules of the game after we put up all this expense to provide service nationwide, that's not fair."

Who else? Well, the telecom companies who usually are bitterly opposed to anything the cable companies say, and in this case, what they say is "yeah, what do these guys say? "We're with them 100%."

Okay. Who else? Well, there are some regulatory bodies that are concerned, and what's their argument? They say, "you know, they do have a point, a city that regulates these providers, now they're going to turn around and compete with private enterprise? Wow, that seems a little shady in the possibilities for corruption graft or just poor service, that's a problem."

Who else? Well, we mentioned that there are consumer groups who are pro; there are some consumer groups that are on the opposite side, and what's their fear? Their argument goes something like this, "Do I really want the city providing me with my wireless access, do I really think this city is going to do a better job? Do I want the same people to take care of my license plates and my vehicle registration to be sending me a bill and providing me service? See, I'm not sure they're going to do a good job in the long run,"

So, you can see there are competing groups here, and they're bitterly opposed to each other, but there is one group of people, a couple of groups actually, who don't really care who wins - Lawyers, and Lobbyists. They don't care as much who wins, their concern is that the battle drag on as long as possible, because it's lucrative for them, so that's the politics of the world for City Wireless.