MuniWireless

Janet West, VP Access Sales and Marketing, revealed the astounding market opportunity for the company at the Muniwireless Dallas Conference. Two major trends, the popularity of Wi-Fi and the significant number of American households still using dial-up to gain access to the Internet, bode well for EarthLink’s municipal wireless strategy. Janet West, VP Access Sales and Marketing, revealed the astounding market opportunity for the company at the Muniwireless Dallas Conference. Two major trends, the popularity of Wi-Fi and the significant number of American households still using dial-up to gain access to the Internet, bode well for EarthLink’s municipal wireless strategy. West mentions that 30% of households in Philadelphia are still on dial-up. You can see what a opportunity this is for EarthLink, not just in Philadelphia but in other cities.

In a presentation entitled “Muniwireless 2.0″, West also pointed out several things they learned about rolling out the networks in Philadelphia, Anaheim, Milpitas, and New Orleans:
- identify all the stakeholders
- cities and their partners have to campaign and educate stakeholders to be successful in the long run (note: actually this is what Jonathan Baltuch of MRI, consultant to the city of St. Cloud, has been emphasizing for over a year);
- address immediately the different hot button issues that bother the diverse stakeholder groups in a large city and create a shared level of understanding.

West also noted that cities now understand open access (this is the wholesale model where the city’s wireless broadband operator opens the network to its competitors) and that they are looking for partners for whom this is a KEY part of the strategy. Cities are not interested in providers who simply mention this in an RFP response to win the bid.

Download Janet West’s presentation from here. It contains the results of a study conducted by EarthLink which shows, among others, that only 13% of online users have never heard of public Wi-Fi and that 44% of high-income (earning over $100,000) users accessed public Wi-Fi in 2006. I believe this number will grow dramatically in the next two years when truly portable Wi-Fi devices such as Nokia’s phones become more available around the world (and also cheaper).