paul callahan…mostly common sense

Though the market appears to be pumped about femto cells, a number of issues remain unresolved.  Whether those issues turn into storm clouds — and eventually rain on the femto cell parade — is simply a matter of innovation.

If femto cell suppliers can invent solutions that overcome these issues, the femto cell market will launch like a roman candle.  If not, the result will be smoke and sputtering noises for years to come.

Here’s the list in no particular order:

1. Automatic access control and mobility — Femto cells need to prevent drive-by users from camping on inadvertently, but also hand-in and hand-out authorized live calls to and from macro cells.
2. Simple activation — Femto cells need to be as close to zero-touch as possible on activation: probably a single phone call with serial number and a dead-simple web interface to add users.  If femto cells are as bad as Wi-Fi configurations, they will flop.
3. Excellent security — Because femto cells will connect via any Internet service, wireless operators need femto cells to authenticate themselves and then encrypt all traffic using a security tunneling protocol such as IPsec.  Anything less than excellent security will be unacceptable — even for the most liberal wireless operator.
4. High-end scalability — Operators will need to connect millions of femto cells.  But unlike cell phones, femto cells will present millions of IPsec tunnels acting like corporate VPN links that never go down.  This will require great honking security gateways to terminate tunnels and handoff calls.
5. Interference mitigation — As I have previously written, femto cells will need enough intelligence to listen, learn, and then automatically mitigate RF interferenece from macro cells and other femto cells on the block.
6. Core network interface — Because femto cells will use existing mobile phones, they will need to connect to the existing mobile operator core network — often a massively clunky mess.  This has already spurred an architectural battle among femto cell competitors.  Presently it is the wild, wild west, but the least disruptive solution will likely win.

Full disclosure: Employed by AIRV at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

The FCC’s recently issued an order on the use of 700 MHz spectrum.  The airwaves have been occupied by television broadcasters, and will be made available for other wireless services, including public safety and commercial services (download the FCC press release).  The spectrum will be vacated by TV broadcasters on February 17, 2009 and auctioned no later than January 28, 2008.  Based on the press release, the FCC order creates:

1. “Open Platform” wireless spectrum.  Whoever wins the auction for this huge chunk of spectrum (22 MHz) must agree to “provide a platform that is more open to devices and applications.”  The goal is to “allow consumers to use the handset of their choice and download and use the applications of their choice.”
2. Nationwide public safetey wireless spectrum.  The winner of the bid for 10–20 MHz of “Nationwide Commercial” wireless spectrum, will join in a Public Saftey/Private Partnership and will also win the right to “build out a nationwide, interoperable broadband network for the use of public safety.”  The winner also gets to use some of the Public Safety network (see the transparent overlap in the figure) as long as their use of the Public Safety network is pre-emptible when there is an emergency.

What is the impact?

1. Google must build a network if it wants to play.  Despite a severe attack of arrogance, Google did us all a favor by influencing the FCC to set aside spectrum for an open platform wireless network.  But the bad news for Google is the fact that it will not be able to buy the spectrum and make money by wholesaling access to the airwaves to others.  Google must bid on the spectrum like everyone else, and then it must build a network and operate it.  Maybe for the first time ever, Google will be faced with getting its hands dirty.  Build a real network, operate it, and deal with all those nasty users complaining that it doesn’t work the way they want it too.  Accountability.  Jeesh, what a bad dream.  Of course, Google can hire someone to build and to run it, but ultimately it will be theirs.
2. The big plum is in the Public Safety spectrum.  The winner of the auction for the National Commercial spectrum, not only gets to build out the Public Safety network and use some of the spectrum when possible, it gets to compete with the Open Platform winner in the 700 MHz band.  What’s so great about 700 MHz?  One of the biggest problems for mobile networks today is coverage, indoor and out.  Because 700 MHz is lower frequency than most of today’s cellular networks, it will have fantastic propagation characteristics.  It will go further in the open air than today’s cellular, and it will penetrate build walls better.  Expect the bidding to be fierce for this chunk of spectrum.

Full disclosure: Employed by AIRV, no position in GOOG at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Google |Muni Wi-Fi |

Femto cells are miniature base stations — low-power cellular access points for the home environment.  Plug a femto cell into your cable modem or DSL router and you light up 5 bars of CDMA or UMTS cell coverage in your home.  If you live in a small town (like I do) that has been arguing about the location of cell towers for close to eight years, you will be a happy camper.  In the next 12–24 months, virtually every mobile operator in the known universe will be offering femto cells to consumers.

But femto cells are not without their technical hurdles.  One of those challenges is the requirement for femto cells to behave nicely in the overall macro cell radio frequency (RF) system.  In other words, when thousands or millions of femto cells interact with the larger cellular infrastructure in the RF domain, they must mitigate the potential interference with other femto cells and with the surrounding macro cell network.

Most people think of femto cells as Wi-Fi routers or access points with different radios.  But femto cells are quite different from Wi-Fi access points. When Netgear, D-Link, or Buffulo ship consumer-grade Wi-Fi routers or access points, they rarely lose sleep over their products’ interaction as a larger system.  Wi-Fi operates in unlicensed bands on a world-wide basis — and in the world of high-volume Wi-Fi products, each product is considered autonomous as long as it passes the test for regulatory compliance.  Some Wi-Fi products automatically select non-interfering channels and adjust their transmit power to avoid interference, and the whole next generation of Wi-Fi products based on 802.11n will use MIMO technology to punch through the noise.  Even so, few consumer designs consider their behavior in a larger system of millions of chatty little radios.  Since no one has responsibility for the good behavior of the overall system, Wi-Fi is your basic free for all.  If your Wi-Fi router is interfering with your neighbor’s, he can tell you to do something about it…that is, if he can find you.

Back to femto cells.  Unlike Wi-Fi, femto cells will interact with macro cell towers and other femto cells in close proximity.  As a result, every femto cell must have a means of listening to the environment around it, and then adjusting approprately to mitigate interference.  What does appropriately mean?

It turns out that each femto cell manufacturer will have its own method of mitigating RF interference.  But there is — in fact — no standard means of doing so at the moment.  Each femto cell producer will have an opportunity to thrive on inventions that outshine the competiton in this area, or crash and burn on something that hardly works at all.  Stay tuned.  The next 12–18 months will be interesting.

Full disclosure: Employed by AIRV at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

The telecom world is abuzz with news of femto cells — minature cellular base stations that provide mobile coverage in the home.  A number of wireless operators have announced plans to deploy millions of the widgets (Vodafone, Sprint, Softbank, Orange, Clearwire, and others) and a pile of vendors have announced the intent to offer femto cell products (Huawei, Ericsson, Ubiquisys, ip-access, Airwalk, to name a few).  Femtos are likely to be offered in nearly every flavor of cellular technology: UMTS, GSM, CDMA, and WiMAX.

For consumers the value proposition is simple: better coverage, maybe family in-home calling plans, and higher performance data services since cellular bandwidth is shared by fewer users.

For operators, they get a much lower cost way of delivering mobile broadband — consumers pay for the femtos and the backhaul vial DSL, cable, or fiber services.

If this shift towards tiny base stations in the home does occur in a big way, what does it mean for competing technologies? 

• Muni-Wi-Fi could suffer further indignities.  As carried recently by the AP, it is unclear whether Muni-Wi-Fi can move beyond a community service project.  If mobile operators can offer better stuff via femtos, why would a town pony up for a municiple Wi-Fi project?  Look out, Tropos and BelAir.
• Home Wi-Fi routers will be in a roil.  Wi-Fi’s inherent interference problems will likely be mitigated by the introduction of 802.11n products, but Wi-Fi routers will be competing with femto cell products operating in the licensed spectrum and controlled by experienced operators.  In addition, femto cell products will also plug into the same DSL and cable modems as today’s Wi-Fi routers.  Some DSL router vendors, such as 2Wire have announced plans to offer femto cell products, but it remains unclear whether DSL Wi-Fi routers will subsume cellular femto cell technology or whether it will be the other way around.

Full disclosure: No position in Clearwire, Ericsson, France Telecom, Huawei, Softbank, Sprint, or Vodafone at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Softbank | Orange | Clearwire | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable |Vodafone | Sprint | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

Dan Jones at Unstrung reports that some muni-wireless, at least in Tempe, Arizona’s city-wide Wi-Fi mesh, doesn’t work very well indoors.  This is highly amusing — and ironic, of course — indoor Wi-Fi adapted for the outdoor market trying to get back inside.  If the concept of 3G and Muni Wi-Fi going head to head in the metro has been foggy in the past, it should be clearer now.  To improve coverage and grab more territory:

1. Wi-Fi is moving outdoors.  Though the WiMAX hype machine has been going full tilt, today’s Muni offerings from BelAir, Tropos, and others are Wi-Fi access points with mesh routing software, packaged in outdoor weather-proof enclosures.
    
2. 3G is moving indoors.  Motorola in the U.S. and smaller companies like ip-access in the UK have created tiny base stations for enterprise and home markets.

Though Wi-Fi is positioned as wireless as a 60s movement where the Internet is free, and 3G is seen as the purvue of big carriers, I expect both technologies approaches to continue to thrive.

Like any technology conflict situation, no single technology ever delivers a perfect solution.  Smart product designers will subsume them all and make money doing it.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | VoIP | EVDO |3G | Verizon | HSDPA | Muni Wi-Fi | Skype | Mobile |

Conflict makes great news, great reading.  People love drama, even when it involves the geekdom of network technology.  In the wireless networking industry, one of the dramas on stage at the moment is the unlicensed spectrum versus licensed spectrum soap opera.  The emerging demand for muni-wireless has created two camps which are developing as direct competitors.  Here is how they would probably describe their positions.

1. Unlicensed is open.  The world should be open and free.  All people should have access to the Internet and to community networks for free — or for advertising.  Wireless networks should be some combination of kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya, power to the people, and Madison Ave.  The push for muniWi-Fi is a movement — and like the 60s movement, if you are in city government you’d better pay attention.  If you want to keep your job, you’d better be putting together an RFP for a municipal wireless network for your town or city.  Key players include, Nortel’s mesh for the non-US market (let’s say the city of Prague), Tropos-Earthlink-Google for San Francisco, and BelAir-Wildfire for Scottdale, Arizona.
2. Licensed actually works.  If you’re dying of a heart attack and you make a call on your free GoogleNet Wi-Fi phone as your lying on the sidewalk in Haight-Ashbury, you might not get through because some dodo on the same block is downloading a porn video, or stepping on your frequency with his death-ray continuous wave X-cam wireless camera.  If you really want wireless to work, you gotta pay.  And you gotta pay the wireless operators, Sprint, AT&T, Orange, blah, blah, blah.  So if you want to keep your city government job, you had better buddy up with the incumbent carriers and operators who know how to run a network 24×7.  Key suppliers include Lucent, Nortel, Airvana, Siemens, Alcatel, Huawei.

But a few players have actually figured out something that the others haven’t.  This not to say that others don’t have products under development, but for the moment these are the only two I can find.  What is the magic pill they have swallowed?

If you stop grousing and put the two technologies together, you end up with a much better product.

Who are they?  For the moment:

• Motorola’s MotoMesh.  Moto has recently started commercial rollout of its public safety mesh product.  Though it uses a multi-radio Atheros-based configuration which would normally be unlicensed-only Wi-Fi, the company tunes some of the Atheros radios to the 4.9 Ghz licensed band with boosted transmit power for a reliable backhaul.  Downlink, or subscriber links are predominately unlicensed Wi-Fi.  Pretty good answer.
• BelAir + ip-access.  By stuffing a licensed band miniature GSM mobile base station into its unlicensed mesh metro product, the two companies have enable a new class of product.  Base stations and APs on a pole that can serve up mobile voice traffic over wireless mesh backhaul and deliver Wi-Fi to the subscriber.  Also a pretty good invention.

Party on with those mash-ups and mix-ins.

Directory Tags: | Wireless, | MuniWireless, |Mobile, | GPRS, | HSDPA, | GSM, | 3G, | TV, | EVDO | Wi-Fi | WiFi | DMOZ Wireless | Yahoo Wi-Fi

More evidence of multi-radio, multi-service devices coming to market with interesting and — hey, look at that! — useful applications.  WebTech Wireless has produced real world, hardened, wireless for trucks.  Wireless for real men, manly men, men’s men…er, and real women in trucking companies.

WebTech started with products that combined GPS and GSM/GPRS for fleet tracking, location, and logging.  But recently, the company announced a product that includes a Wi-Fi radio, the WT1800 Mobile Access Point.

Adding a Wi-Fi access point (AP) allows the trucker to establish her own in-vehicle 802.11 b/g WLAN to connect a laptop or PDA.  The Wi-Fi AP is bridged to the GPRS/EDGE connection as a backhaul.  With GPRS the connection is going to be pretty darn sluggish, but useful for email I suppose.  HSDPA-based services will improve that performance with 400–700K and bursts to a megabit as they roll out.

What makes this product cool, though, is not the smashing together of radios.  Adding radios expands the breadth of applications, but the radios are much less important than the applications themselves.  Apart from the most obvious location tracking and mapping:

• DOT driver logs include time behind the wheel, breaks, compliance with federal regulations.
• Fuel tax data is automatically sent to a partnering service.
• Direct interface to truck diagnostics flags service issues.
• Remote panic button to driver to summon help.
• Ignition disabling for hi-jack protection.
• Connection could be used for real-time inventory and invoicing apps.

I see a definite lesson in this simple repackaging of commodity radio technology.  The real value and differentiation is in the apps.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, GPS, GPRS, HSDPA, Wireless, 3G, Location, Mapping

BelAir and ip.access have smooshed together their products.  But the resulting combination is not a galactic, convergent, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture defined by 3GPP — it is a simple combination of BelAir’s Wi-Fi based metro mesh and ip.access’ GSM pico cell products.

How does it work?  BelAir has stuffed a tiny GSM base station from ip.access inside its metro mesh enclosure, the BelAir 200.  Mounted on a utility pole, the unit becomes a self-contained GSM base station with IP-based wireless backhaul over BelAir’s metro mesh.

What’s it for?  Currently, the two companies are positioning the combined solution as a GSM coverage filler.  Existing mobile operators can place a few nodes in urban areas where customers complain about coverage.

But I think that it could have much broader appeal:

1. Low profile cellular.  I live in a little New England town with terrible cell coverage.  Why?  Because no one can agree on a low-impact cell tower implementation that won’t cause an armed revolt led by the protectors of our colonial architecture.  If we let at&t or Cingular Put 70 to 100 of these puppies on utility poles, everybody’s happy.
2. Wi-Fi service offering.  Along with GSM coverage, mobile operators could offer neighborhood Wi-Fi access to make their customers sticky, or to lure subscribers away from the competition.

What’s in the way?  Money.  The operators must weigh the cost of prolonged disputes and lawsuits over cell tower placements against the cost of a metro/GSM system like this.  Let’s face it, three cell towers are probably cheaper to install and maintain than 100 pole-mounted widgets.  Let’s see how it all costs out when pricing becomes available.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, IMS, Metro, Muni, Wireless, GSM, BelAir, Mesh, Femtocell

Weenie nets continue to drive network innovation, and this one is as bold as they come. FON was started by Martin Varsavsky who reportedly flew from Spain to Silicon Valley a few weeks ago with a business plan in hand and landed $22 million in funding from Google, Skype, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures. He says it was his first time in the valley, so I guess it turned out pretty well.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating the “came out of nowhere” part of the story. Varsavsky started ISP Ya.com and telecom carrier Jazztel and is pretty much a longstanding wild network revolutionary. Now, he is a wild Wi-Fi revolutionary.

FON plans to create 1 million hotspots world-wide in 4 years. How?

1. Give away firmware and seed Wi-Fi routers.  FON is selling Linksys Wi-Fi routers with new FON brains for $25. But braver FON users can optionally download new firmware and re-flash their own Linux-based Linksys Wi-Fi routers for free. Establishing a firewall, the FON firmware carves the routers in two: half for the community, half for the user.
2. Create a movement. FON’s movement creates Foneros — those who are willing to share their Wi-Fi with anyone they reach and create a people’s community network.  FON’s country managers are even called Foneros Leaders. Power to the people, baby, right on, right on, right on. Sorry, I grew up in the 60’s.  Honestly, FON’s marketing approach is phenomenal.
3. Share revenue with ISPs. Before they have heart attacks over the widespread unauthorized resale of their network service, FON plans to strike deals with willing ISPs for revenue sharing.

This an amazing scheme. Can it work? As bold as it is, this is a deal with a heck of lot of moving parts and, like any startup situation, they all have to work perfectly. Nevertheless, I’d love to see it happen. I see challenges in two areas: the firmware injection process, and the ISP deals. My advice?

• Make a real deal with Linksys. Asking the universe of users to reflash their routers is a non-starter. I’ve done it plenty of times, but if you make a mistake you can end up with dead box. If Martin can land Google, Skype, and a couple of venture firms in one trip to CA, one not shoot down to Orange county and convince Linksys to build FON in as an option for all of its Wi-Fi routers? Once you land Linksys, then you can pick off Netgear, D-Link, and Buffalo. Skype has deals with both Linksys and Netgear already. Skype’s biz dev guys should be able to grease the skids.
• Pick a big “ISP-neutral” authentication/accounting partner. Part of the benefit of FON is being able to roam around hotspots and securely authenticate to the network. Scaling to a million users world-wide will require a substantial distributed authentication and accounting system to handle ISP revenue sharing.  Better to do it once, instead of handling it case by case with each ISP. Who has the infrastructure to help? Google? Skype?

So far, this is what we know about Google’s plans for free Wi-Fi in San Francisco.  Apart from making network access free of charge, Google plans to:

1. Make it a playground for devices.  Attract as many users in the widest range of devices as possible.
2. Put it up and see how it’s used.  Gather data on what users search for from Knob Hill or how many X-boxers are gaming in Cole Valley.
3. Allow other Service Providers (SPs) to sell services over it.  But if they want to reach Google’s Wi-Fi users, SPs may need to pay. 
4. Provide location-based ads and maps.  Initial location tracking may be crude — within two city blocks — but must inevitably improve to provide mapping.

What’s this all about?

Extending the franchise to the physical world

If capturing intent on the Internet can make money, why not take it to the physical world?  Better yet, combining the physical world with the Internet will yield rich new data about the behavior of the masses.  If the vast majority of Google Wi-Fi users search for doughnuts when passing through Union Square in San Francisco, Google doesn’t need to explain why.  Data is data.  This is what people do when they are in that vicinity.  Once the data is firmly established, the value of the advertising space in that rough location goes up and up.  If Krispy Kreme wants an ad in that wireless zone, it will have to pay more.

Establishing Google as a peer

Google admits to building its own ISP in the article cited above.  This what a gigantic market cap will do to the brain — cause an attack of hubris that could create a major distraction for the company.  But I think it actually makes sense.  Even if Google only builds out the municipal Wi-Fi portion of the network and skips the construction of a nationwide backbone, the company will have built a network with inherent value to other ISPs.  The offer will be to peer with Google, establishing a balance of power between Google and other ISPs.  The real question will be this: Will Google offer more than connectivity to other ISPs?  Will Google offer a subset of its collected data, namely, where the users of the network are, and what they look for when they get there?