Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
| reply to Karl Bode
Re: Educate me
said by Karl Bode  :Yeah, but just targeting St. Louis and Napa, California is half-assed. When AT&T has a real mind to lock out competition, they bring out the lobbyists on a broader scale and fire up the mammoth PR machine. I have little doubt that their lobbyists are hard at work as we speak. And you can be sure that many of those seemingly grassroots "reform" TV commercials and websites are in fact wolves in sheep's clothing.
This strikes me as just a casual sniff of a potentially competitive market that they probably figure they'll dominate via HSDPA or WiMax anyway.... It's far from casual. It's just one level of a multilevel plan of attack. If they went after every Wi-Fi Internet franchise all at once, even the village idiot would be able to connect the dots. But if they limit themselves to putting up strategic roadblocks that serve to prevent any single entity to gain a regional toehold on the market, then they have accomplished their goal without raising any red flags.
As you pointed out, the window of opportunity for Wi-Fi in this application is closing rapidly. The smart players aren't making large capital investments in a soon-to-be obsolete technology. But they are counting on municipalities to grandfather-in incumbent Wi-Fi franchisees into any new technology deployments, rather than go through the process all over again every time a new wireless standard comes along. |
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John Galt
Forward, March
Premium
join:2004-09-30
Happy Camp
 ·CenturyLink
| said by Time4aNAP :The smart players aren't making large capital investments in a soon-to-be obsolete technology. I hardly think that WiFi is going to be obsolete soon...
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A is A |
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Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
| said by John Galt :I hardly think that WiFi is going to be obsolete soon... As a metropolitan WISP technology? We'll have to see how WiMAX and other 802.16 standards fare in real life. But as it stands in Chicago, it's Canopy® ~6 to Wi-Fi 0. Wi-Fi MANs have been announced with much ballyhoo, but not one has become operational. Heck, the ad hoc WLANs put up by hobbyists have carried more packets than any franchise operation has! |
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