Las Vegas mesh network details

Last August, I posted an article about a pilot project in Las Vegas commissioned by the city’s Traffic Engineering Department for a mesh network that covers approximately 5 square miles (13 square kilometers). The IEEE Spectrum Online has an excellent piece on the Las Vegas mesh network pilot project which you can read on the Spectrum Online website.Last August, I posted an article about a pilot project in Las Vegas commissioned by the city’s Traffic Engineering Department for a mesh network that covers approximately 5 square miles (13 square kilometers). The IEEE Spectrum Online has an excellent piece on the Las Vegas mesh network pilot project which you can read on the Spectrum Online website.

Below are interesting details about the Las Vegas network.

Costs

Cheetah Wireless Technologies, the systems integrator, says it cost $175,000 for the 5 sq km project (approx. $80,000 for 2.6 sq km of which $50,000 went to mesh hardware and $30,000 to servers). To unwire the entire city (150 sq km), they estimate it would cost $6 million.

It took city workers one truck and an eight-hour shift to put up 18 routers (they are using mesh routers from MeshNetworks, now owned by Motorola). They installed a total of 33 routers (therefore 2 days of work). One T-1 line is needed for every three “intelligent access points” (IAPs); one IAP is needed to cover 2.6 square kilometers and one wireless router every 0.62 square kilometer.

Bandwidth and interference

The average transmission speed on the network is between 500Kbps and 1.5 Mbps. The network is not open to public access; the Las Vegas Traffic Engineering Department is using it to test applications for traffic monitoring and control. The city may later decide to enter into a deal with Cheetah for a public access network, but there are no plans for that yet.

What’s interesting is that the area in which the network is deployed poses serious interference problems not just from other Wi-Fi networks but from the airport. They managed to reduce the interference using MeshNetworks’ routers.

Business models: private-public partnership

There’s a lot of debate about whether municipalities should become ISPs and deliver telecommunications services. We have seen the controversy in Pennsylvania and Lafayette, Louisiana where incumbent telcos and cable companies raise roadblocks to municipal deployments of wired and wireless broadband. Their claim is that municipalities compete unfairly with private companies.

However, there is another model in which a municipality sets up a passive network and allows multiple providers on the network, or where it commissions one provider to build and run the network. This is the model being followed in Rio Rancho, New Mexico and Cerritos, California.

The city could give a company like Cheetah Technologies the right to put up equipment on light poles. Cheetah would run the network for Las Vegas and charge a monthly fee. In the IEEE Spectrum Online article, Cheetah suggested a price of $20 to $40 per month for fixed wireless access; $60 – $80 per month for roaming access. I think these amounts are still on the high side. To succeed as a wireless broadband provider, I believe you need to give people a replacement for wired DSL and cable. A price of $15 to $25 per month depending on bandwidth would be far more attractive to customers. Bandwidth should also be in the range of 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps. I do not see a lot of ISPs offering bandwidth in this range except in Europe and Asia.

The city makes some money from the network by sharing revenues with the service provider, with portion set aside for the municipality’s own use of the network. In any event, municipalities save a lot of money by using the wireless network for a variety of municipal applications for utility and field service workers, social workers, police and fire department personnel.

Interesting tidbit on the size of the municipal broadband market

I came across an interesting detail about the size of the municipal wireless broadband market. The article says:

Municipal broadband wireless networking is a market currently worth almost US $500 million in the United States and one that could grow to over $2 billion by 2008, according to Input, a Reston, Va.-based analysis firm. And if mesh operators can establish themselves in towns and cities across the nation, selling services to commercial users in addition to municipal ones could swell their revenues even more. A study by two other firms, BWCS, in Ledbury, England, and Senza Fili Consulting LLC, in Sammamish, Wash., estimates the commercial U.S. wireless broadband market will grow to $3.7 billion by 2009.

I have been looking for analyses of the size of the municipal wireless broadband market. I have not found any and I get questions almost every week from vendors and investment analysts on this subject. I tried to find out more about the Input analysis but could not find anything online. If you know of a good research report, please email me.