My newest model which I call, Galactus – Destroyer of Wired Worlds  (say it with a low grumble in your voice for more effect), is designed just for that battle.  The good part is that you can do it today and be ready for tomorrow.  And when tomorrow comes, or really 802.11ac, it will just drop right in and re-arm you for the next few years of wired and fiber battle.  However, the WISP paradigm and deployment mentality are going to have to change to take advantage of tomorrow’s technologies.

Galactus – Destroyer of Wired Worlds – Dun, Dun, Duuunnn (we really need another Fantastic Four movie, it’s been too long), is based on the concept of a short range, low-capex, very high-capacity model.  The kind of model that can laugh in the face of wired competition knowing that nothing they are working on is going to be as competitive from a cost/benefit standpoint, at least not for the real world that most of us have to live in.  Of course, you can thank the Federal Government and its brilliant taxing policies for some of that but hey, in the US, it works to your benefit if you only provide Internet and stay away from phone service.  The reality is that with Ooma, MagicJack, and everyone having a cell phone, the POTS phone industry is on the decline.  Also, to expand into a new area, I suggest that we do what we are best at, which is deliver bandwidth.

Galactus, Galactus, Galactus – takes the idea that we now have very high-capacity, low-cost backhaul options today along with some new frequencies to work with.  What’s great is that we have decent, low-cost 802.11n equipment that can build the basic Galactus model today. Ubiquiti adding DFS frequencies to their core radios, the Rocket M5, the Nanostation M5, and the Nanobridge M5, was a huge stepping stone towards the 802.11ac market and the beginning of the Galactus model (I’m out of text-based sound effects).  It’s kind of a cross between mesh and PTMP.  Mesh needed APs every few hundred feet.  PTMP systems are designed for ranges up to several miles.  Galactus assumes low-height (sub-15 metre) APs every square kilometer or so.  Towers can be used for backhaul to the APs or some other method depending on the deployment.

With a 5.8GHz AP and 36dBm output, then you can get some serious bandwidth to a CPE to at least 1Km or more, even with vegetation. What’s amazing is that with about 50m of tree at a 1Km distance, 5.8GHz has more throughput than 2.4GHz or 3.65GHz.  Pshaw you say?  The fact is that the higher EIRP of 5GHz along with wider channels, more than compensates for the higher frequency differential and the attenuation.

With Ubiquiti 802.11n equipment, you can get somewhere around 50-100Mbps at the AP depending on what 2×2 device you are using and 50-60Mbps at the client. However, when 802.11ac comes out and you upgrade the AP, you could be talking about an AP capable of 1Gbps or more. With that kind of speed, you can also get more users per AP, even without polling protocols. DSL becomes a fading memory and your lower Capex means that Cable and Fiber companies start getting marginalized to clients that think they really need 100Mbps and are willing to pay for it.

Clients want to think they are buying the fastest service for the least amount of money even though they don’t understand it.  The consumer ideal means more is better and too much is just right, especially if it’s the cheapest.  If their video streaming doesn’t buffer and their Internet connection works when some undereducated, over-plasticized celebrity tweets some brilliant words of intellectual wisdom like “I just bought a gorgeous Gucci purse that was so infabuliciuos, I had my poodles fur dyed to match it”, they are thrilled if they can look up the purse in 1.7 seconds.  Do that, save them a few bucks, and the customers will be tripping over themselves to bail on their current provider.  802.11ac lets you advertise numbers that will blow them away, especially in markets that only have DSL providers.

Now add in the execution of 802.11ac with its ability to use wider channels than 802.11n with faster processors.  Mix it with the increased spectral efficiency and 802.11ac can theoretically handle up to 1.7Gbps at the AP with channel widths up to 160MHz.  Yeah, I know some of you are already using your fingers to make the sign of the cross yelling, NO 40MHz CHANNELS, let alone 160MHz channels.  Ha, 40MHz is for little children and weaklings and to maintain 802.11n compatibility.  I’m saying put on your big boy pants.   Anything named after a planet eater isn’t going to use puny 40MHz channels, Galactus means big.  We are talking about 80Mhz channels at least.  80MHz channels means that with 4×4 MIMO, an 802.11ac AP can kick out over 1Gbps.  And an 80MHz channel is really less than 15% of the available bandwidth up in 5GHz.  I say “80MHZ CHANNELS FOR EVERYONE, ITS ON THE HOUSE” (c’mon, you knew antenna double entendre had to be coming J).

Ahh, but what good is it if we can’t get backhaul to the AP.  Seriously, that’s the argument you are going to use?  We are wireless guys.  If there is a vertical asset, we can exploit it.  However, since Galactus was designed to be dropped right behind the enemy lines of wired infrastructure, we also need to look at everything, including the Underground Railroad, such as metro Ethernet or local fiber.  With AirFiber, Radwin, Canopy 450 (the trick here is to use the AP on both sides with one in SM mode since the SM’s aren’t fast enough)  and some really cool equipment coming out from SAF, Trango, and Exalt, there are many ways to get backhaul to local APs for very little Capex.  Even if you start out using 5.8GHz 802.11n right now (which I’m doing), you know that 802.11ac is coming out to supplement it.  For short distances from the tower, 5.4GHz can be used, for longer distance, 5.8GHz.  Both can be set up with PTMP.  Add that to the FCC promising to open up another 195MHz of bandwidth with some of it possibly using UNI-II Upper rules that means even more long range backhaul capacity.  I’m hoping that whoever takes over for Julian continues this process in the FCC.  Personally, I think the first question from the Senate during the nomination hearings should be what phone carrier the nominee uses and are they happy with it so we know who they are steering the next cellular USF subsidy to.

Finding a vertical asset every square Km or so, depending on vegetation, lets you deploy a high-capacity system that puts a WISP head-to-head with wired infrastructure.  Even though you can do it, the next question is whether not it’s financially feasible.  Well, assuming you can keep the monthly cost at about 50 percent of the revenue per AP average, it’s a smart play.  As a WISP, you can always buy your way into a market, meaning being the lowest priced provider, so there is literally no excuse for not generating $1000 per month or more off any AP.  There are a large percentage of people that are very tired of cable and DSL bills going up constantly, plus they probably hate the taxes but they don’t want to go backwards in capacity.  With 802.11ac, you can advertise DOCSIS 3.0 cable speeds and fiber bandwidth numbers at DSL prices.

So what about the 5.8GHz deployments you already have in place with clients further out than 1Km?  802.11ac is going to be better but not that much better.  The fundamental problem is that 256QAM, the highest modulation rate of 802.11ac, needs a better s/n ratio than 64QAM 802.11n. The number jumps from about 22dBm to about 28dBm to get there.  Basically to get the higher speeds of 802.11ac, you are going to get half the distance.  Canopy 450 WISPs found that out quickly when trying to move over Canopy 100 series clients since they went from FSK to OFDM.  Physics are physics.  If you are using DFS frequencies, then your distance is even shorter because of EIRP limitations.  That is both bad and good.  The good part is that it means interference is down and the s/n ratio will be very high, a perfect environment for 802.11ac.

Who knows what will happen in the future?  If the FCC gets an additional 195MHz approved and at least 100MHz of it follows UNI-II Upper rules which gives us 53dBm to play with, then a 40MHz channel still yields over 300Mbps per AP and the distances go up.  You will just be upsizing the client antennas about 6dBi over what you used to use for 802.11N or Canopy 450 deployments.  The worst case that happens is that homeowners associations get a little bit upset when you are sticking 30dBi+ antennas on roofs.

Galactus is all about getting back into the suburban trenches with wireline providers.  It’s also about future proofing to match any future speed increases from wireline.  Although DSL is toast, Intel is pushing its new 1Gb cable upgrade over DOCSIS 3.0.  However, the old adage, “Speed, Distance”, Quality” which definitely applies to 802.11ac over 802.11n, also applies to cable.  Older cable and longer distances are going to mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be replaced to get 1Gbps on cable.  Since most cable companies haven’t even amortized the cost of upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 yet, I suspect it will be a while.  Fiber proponents are still pushing for applications that have no value for at least 10 years and no money to pay for it.  If anyone can name a single application today that can’t run over 50Mbps from a house that will advance the digitial divide or productivity in this country today, I’ll publicly apologize for telling FTTH supporters that they need to find a better cause that doesn’t involve taxpayers money.  I argue that cheaper, faster internet at 20Mbps is far more important than a transport medium that can download a Peterbuilt when the only apps we have are Smart Cars.

In the meantime, 802.11ac puts the WISP operator in the game with cable providers and GALACTUS – DESTROYER OF WIRED WORLDS (TA DA) demonstrates one model of that implementation.  But don’t wait for 802.11ac, get started today with 802.11n and be ready for it when it gets here.  Your accountant will thank you.

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Previous article: Tales from the Towers, Chapter 42: Frustration, Thy Name is Backhaul Support

The post Tales from the Towers, Chapter 43: Galactus – Destroyer of Wired Worlds appeared first on MuniWireless: WiFi, LTE, 4G.

Sure, I can tell you how the first Christmas call I got is from a customer with a new Kindle. Since her computer was wired directly to the CPE, she realized that she needed her wireless router. This would be the router sitting in the garage for the last 18 months, 9 months before we did our installation. So, that means the technician who installed the CPE antenna never even knew she had a wireless router and of course, she thinks he should magically know the security code. No, I’m not here to tell you stories about those kinds of calls since I can’t devote January to compiling them and many of you have your own list.

I’m here to tell you about data carriers who think that everyone above Level 1 tech support doesn’t need to give a flying donut about the customers. As they sit on Mount Data Center Olympus, they look upon us knaves as the ignorant masses who should accept the fact that our network is down until they feel like dealing with it. It’s simply inconceivable to them that they screwed up; it must be our fault. They think about us, the last mile data carriers that aren’t Cox, Time Warner, or CenturyLink the way the Goa’uld think about the Tau’ri (Stargate reference in that the Goa’uld think they are Gods and that the Tau’ri, the humans, are ignorant peons to be enslaved). Yeah, I’m a SciFi  geek.

I just spent 4 days working through a level of denial, stonewalling, outright incompetence, arrogance, and downright laziness with 3 out of the 4 companies I deal with. I’m not naming names because in my experience, they aren’t unique. Apparently the concept of customer support is totally foreign to some backhaul carriers. The lack of oversight on how their departments treat their customers is extremely evident because I’m thinking that if the CEO of any of these companies knew how bad it was, heads would be rolling. Of course, the culture of keeping customers with Level 1 technicians trained and boxed in so that it’s impossible to escalate a call (at least that’s what they tell the customers until you threaten all sorts of mean, nasty things) to the mysterious Gods of Networking is the fault of the CEOs. It’s not even remotely possible that level 2 staff made a mistake or even be bothered to check with the customer to see if a call should be closed (part 2 will cover this ingenious decision). If this were one company out of 4, okay, maybe it’s an anomaly. But it occurred with 3 out of 4. And the company that I exempted basically did their job, but I still had to initiate every single follow up call, 5 of them. They never called me back every hour (as they said they would every single time) for an update even though this outage was 5 hours past their SLA. However, when I did call, a technician answered and they then moved to get an update.

Since I was dealing with 2 separate outages, I’ll start with the first one which also took the longest to resolve. That’s because it’s harder to fight your reseller and their last-mile carrier simultaneously.  It’s kind of like having to climb over the barb-wire fence first just to get to the mine field. And while you are working your way through the mine-field, barb-wire fence keeps popping up after each step. When you have to do the job of the reseller’s tech support supervisor on top of that, life gets rough. It’s even worse when the Level 2 reseller tech support techs try to parse and jump on every word you say to avoid having to call the last-mile carrier. They also like to subtly remind you that you aren’t qualified to operate a TV remote control, let alone tell them that their network doesn’t work properly and why. I have now learned from 3 different people how the ping command works because apparently I was unaware that I needed a re-education in this. Must be test coming up that nobody has told me about.

If this article does nothing more than tell the resellers and backhaul carriers that somebody needs to be reviewing their absolutely pathetic customer service above Level 1, then it has some value beside my personal therapeutic value. Hopefully this article helps you to navigate through the painful ordeal that is our backhaul carrier’s support processes. I firmly believe now that these processes were developed by the medical insurance industry and ported word-for-word into our industry. Either way, I hope my ranting has some redeeming value because I know that if I have to go through this again, I will be hiring a full time Anger Management consultant, making an appointment with the Hair Club for Men, and putting a gastroenterologist on speed dial.

A few days before Christmas, we started getting calls that web browsing had pauses of 15-30 seconds between pages. NetFlix users were also having big streaming buffering problems. We knew about the NetFlix/Amazon problem and also thought it might be our network since our load was up about 300% since September. We looked at 5.5.2 Ubiquiti firmware as a possibility since there were some rumblings in that area on the forums. So, after quickly testing 5.5.4 Beta 2 in our office, we decided to deploy it on our APs and for a day or so, things seemed to be much better. Ah, problem solved, life is good. Silly me, I was so naïve. It had nothing to do with the firmware although 5.5.4 Beta 2 was working better than 5.5.2. However, we did go back to 5.5.2 when further testing showed some possible compatibility issues with 5.5.4 RC-1 that we didn’t have time to review as of this article (my wife made it clear to me that  spending time with the in-laws was more fun than playing with new firmware features across a few hundred radios). The firmware does seem to work very well and will be an improvement but you probably shouldn’t deploy it mixed with 5.5.2 Beta 2 in a production environment yet or at least do your own testing before making that decision.

The problem cropped up again the next day, or at least that’s when we started getting calls again. Now we were looking at the authentication servers and routers. Couldn’t find a problem there either and the Peplink load-balancing routers had been rock solid for years. So, we were down to the provider’s routers. We realized that we were seeing two circuits that normally run about the same level of bandwidth because of the load-balancing, having a bandwidth usage differential of 10-1 that was unexplained. We rebooted one of carrier routers, and bounced the Peplink port on that router. Now it wasn’t coming up at all. This is where the fun starts so grab a HoHo, a glass of milk, and the Pepto-Bismol and get comfortable.

I’m not a big fan of following the rules, especially when everything in my experience set tells me that something smells wrong and the obvious direction I’m being told to follow is the same failed path I’ve gone down before. However, in the interest of the Christmas Spirit and Good Will Towards your Fellow Man thing, I followed process and opened the call as I’m supposed to.  A Level 1 tech (or as I have nicknamed them, Evil Guardians of Truth and Productivity and the preventer of getting my circuit back up and running) took the call, and tried the usual “did you power cycle every computer within 5 square miles” shtick. I realized it needed to get escalated quickly, but they said I would hear back from them within a couple hours. Even though I let him do it, I knew the model for their Level 2 tech support was “We don’t need to call no stinkin’ customers back” from past experience. However, I waited my obligatory 2 hours, got scolded by at least 10 new Kindle owners during that time, added another 30 minutes extra, and then started over again.

The standard lie that the Level 1 tech support personnel tell you is that they have no way to contact Level 2 tech support. Companies that think this firewall is a good policy in that a data communications company can’t reach another division within their company clearly need to be cleaning out some middle management. However, the level of difficulty for Level 1 to reach Level 2 varies between companies. Some companies only allow Level 1 to use some type of Instant Messaging or email for Level 2 (brilliant move there CenturyLink, for your business customers and why I’m now another provider at my office). Yeah, dictating to a Level 1 tech person middleman who is typing at 50 words per minute trying to describe a routing problem is so much more efficient than talking at 125 words per minute. And with feedback from new information taking minutes, it takes an hour to convey something that could be resolved in moments.  It’s simply a really stupid policy and does nothing but waste time for the Level 1 tech, ticks off the customer to no end, and forces Level 2 techs to multi-task which is difficult in a conversation, but impossible in a highly-technical solution process. It doesn’t help that the Level 2 techs also start off with the same stupid question, “Have you checked the cables and power cycled everything first”.  I too am a fan of the IT Crowd (British Comedy TV show about a dysfunctional corporation and the tech support guys in the basement), but that wastes another 20 minutes waiting for reboots and is the reason my cell phone almost became a projectile.

If you calmly explain to the Level 1 tech that you graduated the 3^rd grade, know that the word computer doesn’t start with a K, and that your shirt matches your pants, you might gain enough credibility to get them to understand you aren’t a total idiot. When that doesn’t work (you have a 50/50 chance here) then you ask for a supervisor or tell them to connect you to Level 2 because this problem is above their pay grade. This effort raises your chances of getting to Level 2 by 0% but it makes you feel better. That’s when you threaten to commit Hari-Kari, start throwing out your technical analysis of the problem with every detail and what you have done to resolve it thus proving it’s their problem, not yours, and tell them you have contracts from their competition sitting on your desk ready to sign.  Miraculously, they have now discovered the extension number of Level 2 support.

So, we are now about 3 hours into this problem and still nothing has been accomplished. When you finally reach Level 2 tech support and you get past the obligatory, “have you power cycled the router”, (I never get tired of hearing that one because it’s so much more funny the 30^th time it’s repeated), then you basically sit on the phone while the new tech rereads the notes on this problem. It’s really silly of you to think that anybody in Level 2 even looked at this yet since it’s only an hour past since they were to respond. Oh wait, I almost forgot the best part. Before this second call, while waiting for Level 2 to call you back, this little jewel pops up in my Inbox from said department on my case, Level 2:

“We need verification from the EU if they want DHCP enabled on the router or not.”

After I picked myself off the floor, I reviewed everything to make sure I hadn’t just jumped to another dimension and Rod Serling was talking to an audience about this. Let’s see, one of my circuits is dropping 5-15 pings or basically freezing up every 2 -3 minutes for 30 seconds or so and my other circuit isn’t even close to delivering the bandwidth I’m paying for. That’s the official trouble ticket. Now go back and read the response from Level 2 again and tell me that as an industry, we should be worried that “going networking” hasn’t replaced “going postal”.  Of course they called the local carrier and asked them to check everything. When the carrier responded with, “everything is working fine but the DHCP setting might be wrong”, my reseller Level 2 technician thought this was such a great response, he couldn’t wait to share it with me before critically analyzing this vital information to see how it fit into my trouble ticket. Utterly brilliant, and now I’m kicking myself because I didn’t think of the DHCP setting being turned on or off as the possible culprit?  What was I thinking?

This is on my business circuit that never used DHCP and has been on static IP addresses from the beginning. How two Level 2 technicians or network engineers came to the epiphany that DHCP has anything to do with this issue is something that I will never be able to explain to my dying day and for which I never got an answer. For reference to my possible reflection that either everyone in the world has gone crazy or it’s just me, reread the first paragraph. It was either that or Allen Funt was going to jump out any time and tell me I was on Candid Camera.

Maybe the Level 2 techs got into the eggnog too early or maybe their multi-tasking led to this mistake. What I do know is that my reseller Level 2 support never called me and then somehow came up with this brilliant conclusion. I also knew at this point that I was going to have to restart the tech support ladder from the bottom with 50 client calls backed up and I’ve been down about 4 hours now. The last thing I wanted to do was walk 2 companies though troubleshooting processes for something they are supposed to be the experts in. I’m also 100 miles from home and missing hand-made ravioli with all my relatives who flew in to visit us for Christmas. I’m not in a great mood for this kind of apathetic effort on their part. I could tell that this was going to be a very long day.

I’m going to pause now until Part Two of this epic adventure.  I know that many of you have had far worse technical support problems with issues 300’ in the air in below freezing weather. I understand that and have been through some of that myself so believe, me, I feel for you. This article isn’t about looking for sympathy about some of the challenging and difficult environments that we deal with. Be honest, it beats sitting behind a desk all day and if we didn’t love it, we would be doing something else. It’s more about how difficult it is for a WISP when you have to deal with tech support processes put in place by incumbent carriers that simply don’t care about customer service. It’s either that or they hire managers and staff who would rather be playing Halo 4 than doing their job. The only guy I feel for in this process is the Level 1 tech who has to make a decision to escalate a call to Level 2 or actually call them to do their job, especially if I’m on the other end of that line after my last trouble ticket email from Level 2.

So now you know the reason for my Christmas ulcer. I started the whole process over again but with the knowledge that Level 2 tech support is going to require me to hold their hand to get their job done.  That means no mercy anywhere along the process since I am painfully now aware that Level 1 is impotent and Level 2 is lazy and inattentive. As you can see, I’m 3 pages deep and still haven’t gotten a single thing accomplished with either company and now other data circuits are down at another location 80 miles away.  The hits just keep on coming.  Part two of this article might be a little less cynical after I’ve had lots of really, really good eggnog and with my used to be fresh leftover ravioli that now have to be micro waved to death (aaarrrggghhhh).  If I ever needed a HoHo for dessert and comfort, now would be the time.

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Next article: Tales from the Towers, Chapter 43: Galactus – Destroyer of Wired Worlds

The post Tales from the Towers, Chapter 42: Frustration, Thy Name is Backhaul Tech Support appeared first on MuniWireless: WiFi, LTE, 4G.

What is the most effective way to advertise on MuniWireless?

Here is a summary of what I have seen over the last 9 years.

(1) Case studies are the most effective way for equipment vendors, service providers and consultants to market their products and services. When you give away something useful and interesting (and well written), people contact you. Not only that, they will pass around your case study. Virality is very important.

Writing a Sponsored Post for MuniWireless and placing a banner ad that links directly to your case study are extremely effective. In addition, Google search picks up the Sponsored Post so you get additional Google juice. MuniWireless rises relatively high on searches associated with the topics we write about.

Nearly everyone who posts a case study link on our site, links it directly to their own website. The question is: should the link go directly to a downloadable PDF or should it go to a form where the potential customer fills in his or her name and email address?

In my experience, if you link it to a form, many will just click away. Most people do not like to be spammed with useless information which they fear they will get once they leave their email. If the person downloading your case study finds it interesting enough to contact your company, he or she will do so.

(2) Well-made video case study: Check out this Sacramento case study video that we made for Accela.

Link to Accela video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxGcOT7kYf8

I spoke to the client, Accela, and they told me they were very satisfied with the video. Many people who watched it were quite impressed and contacted Accela.

If you are thinking of video case studies, contact me immediately.

(3) For new companies, your logo should be everywhere: on banner ads, on the MuniWireless newsletter, on sponsored posts, on sponsored polls. The problem with companies that enter the market is: people say who? Who is that?

What happens when your logo shows up in many places is that people start feeling comfortable with doing business with you. You become an old familiar (and trustworthy) face even if you haven’t been around for a long time. It’s human psychology, I guess. But you become part of the landscape and suddenly when someone mentions your company’s name, someone else will say, “Yeah I know them.” Even though the person doesn’t really KNOW your products and services intimately and may not have used them at all.

That’s my advice. If you want to get our media kit, post a comment below or contact me directly esme[at]muniwireless.com.

The post Advertising on MuniWireless: What Works appeared first on MuniWireless: WiFi, LTE, 4G.

Every time a new product comes out, there is a lot of discussion about pros and cons, and how it works within existing deployments. The primary manufacturers have been following the same formulas for years. Cambium Networks (a spin-off from Motorola Canopy) targets high-density, long-range tower deployments with its tower-centric hardware product line. Ubiquiti’s product line is pretty much designed for everything else that is deployed by wireless ISPs (WISPs). This long-range tower-centric model is the only one that makes sense from a financial position for WISPs with Cambium equipment. When an access point (AP) costs $3000-$4000 or when it costs $10,000-$50,000 to outfit a tower with APs, routers, backhaul radios, and battery backups, it’s imperative to maximize the efficiency of that tower to increase profitability.

Although Ubiquiti can do tower-centric designs, long-range works best in areas where interference is at a minimum and line-of-sight (LOS) deployments are feasible. It’s a challenge to make the 802.11n WiFi based protocol work in non-line of sight (NLOS) environments and the lack of GPS synchronization limits high-density AP type deployments. That means towers aren’t the best in cities and suburbs as I’ve covered in many Tales of the Towers articles. However, it’s more flexible and cheaper with the AP/CPE option built into a wide variety of products, some of which start at less than $50 (let me introduce you to my little friend, the Ubiquiti NS2M Loco).  In high-density areas though, I’m moving everything to 5GHz which means the NS5M Loco for $20 more.

What is more interesting to me is that all of the Motorola Canopy CPE product lines look the same with an integrated radio and relatively low-gain antenna. Even Ubiquiti borrowed that same design, albeit with electronically switchable dual-polarity in their Nanostation product line. Move forward to Cambium’s 450 series, and they are sticking with the same formula. Put up the AP, if you need more range, add a reflector. Why mess with success, right? Let’s just say that my enthusiasm for that design today falls somewhere between a teeth cleaning and a root canal. You need it for Cambium because that’s the only real option they give you, unless you want to connectorize everything. But what if we start over and really look at what works best for installers and my Diet Coke fund (I keep trying but I’m not getting product placement endorsements yet)?

Ubiquiti opened up the drawing board a little further. The Bullets were the first radio that broke the mold and went right to solving a problem. The entire AP, screwing right into the back of the antenna, was innovative and clever. The NanoBridge product line was next, unique in both cost and performance. You can’t beat 25dBi of antenna gain and a lower profile than a reflector for less than $100. What a deal! That means J-mounts without reinforcement (although finding a 30-inch J-mount that isn’t back-ordered for 2 months has been a challenge),  lower wind profile than a reflector, and it’s a cheaper install even if it didn’t cost less. MikroTik does the same thing but the gain of their antenna barely trips my gain meter. The MikroTik unit is cute though, kind of like a little porcelain knick-knack that my grandma puts on her fireplace and doesn’t really do much.

But time marches on and so does DOCSIS 3.0 and VDSL. I suspect VDSL is probably the end of the line for twisted pair so that just leaves cable and fiber long term. Intel is pushing their new 1Gbps DOCSIS specification, but I have to imagine that means RG-59 is going to become the elephant in the room, so to speak, that is going to all have to be replaced and the cable companies aren’t going to pay for that. The problem with all of us is the assumption that our way is the right way forever. If you are profitable and still growing without sacrificing the quality of service with your existing clients, then it’s the right way now for you. However, as WISPs start to overlap each other and run up against Wireline providers, the challenge to continue following the same old ways when you are totally aware of limitations becomes pointless. And if cows could fly, I’d never have known the joys of chocolate milk.

Manufacturers have unknowingly artificially limited us in these areas because they are building what they know. Ubiquiti’s dual-function AP/CPE M series product line (yes, I know they weren’t the first but they definitely took it to the market successfully) has let me do things I could never do with Canopy. Guerilla Wireless and S.P.I.R.I.T are two of the models I’m deploying that would never have been feasible with a rigid tower-centric product line.  AirFiber is another product that will help me enhance these models.  As each new tool comes out, more possibilities occur. However, these incremental changes aren’t sufficient to really take on the cable providers yet and maximize profitability. At the rate the wireless industry is moving in this area, we will be competing against DOCSIS 8.0 by the time we get there.

A lot of the manufacturers’ decisions on what to build are driven by us. They build what we tell them, what we know and consider safe and comfortable, sometimes to our own detriment. Check out the flying wing concept plane Boeing wanted to build. It would have revolutionized the cost model for the airline industry years ago. However, researchers found that passengers wouldn’t fly on them without windows (boy, I wish I were there to smack the people who insisted on this the focus groups, dooming us to 100-year old designs), thus airlines weren’t going to buy them, and hence it died. Instead we get the AirBus and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  Yes, they are better than current models but nowhere near as good as we could possibly get.  We get evolutionary, not revolutionary (okay, except in the case of AirFiber and innovation from SAF and Trango to compete). Fortunately for us, the customers could give a flying donut as to what our APs look like as long as their house doesn’t resemble Mission Control. The exception to that rule was my Grandparents who let me put up a 40-foot telescoping mast with a 22-foot Avanti Sigma 5/8 antenna on their roof with guy wires every 10 feet.  Seventy feet from ground level meant that as CB base stations went, it was very, very cool.  Who knew that nylon wasn’t a good guy wire?

If the wireless industry wants to really compete with the next frontier within the limitations that the government has put on us, we need to start over. We need to put on our big boy pants and look at the WISP industry holistically, not specifically.  We have radios, we have network components, then we have accessories, and finally we have existing deployment models. Now that the end user wants NetFlix and DOCSIS 3.0/VDSL are happy to deliver it, we need to fundamentally start over and design for that and what’s beyond that. For Wireline, it’s fiber. Based on what I’m seeing with our economy and our wonderful share-the-wealth president trying to suck every penny he can out of the free-market in taxes, (yea, that makes sense), there will be little funding available for fiber in the near future.  Wireless, with the right deployment model can fill that role, especially with what we have coming next.

Ahh, a pipe dream you say.  Nay, Nay I respond.  Remote WISP deployments aside, think about how you would deploy in every neighborhood in the country if you hadn’t ever seen a Canopy or Nanostation product line. Shake the Etch-a-Sketch and start over with your magical 3-D Printer which could create whatever you could dream.

The next component in this process is a manufacturer that is willing to start over. Of course what equipment we have out there is great or none of us would be here.  However, we are still hiding in the woods and behind the hills. Very few of us are directly competing with Wireline from day one. If you have 5000 remote clients paying $50 or more per month, you can subsidize growth into an area that might have a lower starting revenue point. However, if you are starting from scratch tomorrow, even if you are sitting with $1M in the bank, how do you go right into a Wireline area, deliver the quality of service that Wireline providers provide along with their speeds and expectations and compete with $20 per month? I’m doing that now by designing around what I have available instead of defining the standard of what I should be doing. There is lot of opportunity that we are still leaving on the table.

For that, we are going to need some manufacturing help on several levels. The problem is that building the type of system we need to compete with Wireline, will require a new paradigm and partnerships.  We don’t need any new technologies to build these type of products (although MU-MIMO will really help), we just need a different starting point. However, it will either take a significant investment or a lot of different partners coordinated in building this product line.  Third party products have been filling in many holes that manufacturers have left open for WISPs. Beehive created reflectors, surge protectors, and many other products. RF Armor built shields. MikroTik built routers. Tycon built PoE switches. What I’m seeing now is that manufacturers are starting to overlap and eat into each other’s market share as they expand their product lines.

So what type of product line is necessary to go from the 5% of the country that we fit into and get into the other 95%?  Mesh obviously isn’t the answer although it was a good first effort. The original products were too expensive to deploy and maintain, and were unable to scale. Mesh itself wasn’t the problem, the deployment model of mesh also held it back along with the routing protocol.  Then add in technology obsolescence which meant upgrading was going to require the complete replacement of every single piece of equipment. When you have spent at least $100,000 per square mile to deploy a full coverage system, that’s not even realistically financially possible. That and they ended up being far slower than their marketing material implied (yes, we all use UDP for all traffic so let’s put that in the headlines instead of TCP/IP at half the speed).

PTMP tower based systems clearly aren’t moving into New York City and with the limitations placed on WISPs for free frequency bands, they aren’t going through buildings and trees. Throw in the interference levels now being created in all the bands from WISPs, personal use of wireless equipment, and SCADA use in the 900MHz. White Space hasn’t developed where it needs to, but it will be pretty much useless in or near most major cities.

That’s the dire reality.  However, engineers are a very resourceful bunch. Ubiquiti’s AirFiber as a (point-to-multipoint) PTMP product is really cool not just what it can do today but what it can possibly do down the road.  I’m not talking about simply increasing the throughput with a higher QAM rate, but using it as the foundation for a whole new product line that isn’t based on 802.11. No, I don’t have any information that hasn’t been all over the forums or casually discussed at WISPA, but it is a whole new chipset from scratch. It’s also one that split the transmit and receive into 2 different antennas. It’s not hard to extrapolate what that gives Ubiquiti in the toolbox down the road, including a proprietary RF technology.

Although little MikroTik routers based on Atheros and Atom processors are cool, Xirrus radios using Cavium processors (meaning really fast and cheap) brought a whole bunch of other possibilities rushing to the front of my brain. Then Ubiquiti announces stacks of routers that are either based on those or something very similar at prices almost in MikroTik’s sweet spot but with more power than a steroid laced Barry Bonds. However, Mikrotik  isn’t going quietly and has introduced its own router line that also looks like it’s based on the same router core at the upper end. The gloves are off and I love a good free-market street fight. However, I go back to Xirrus again and really like the use of the Cavium processor simply in the AP. Clearly it’s being underutilized in their product since I still have to add more layer 3 processing in a large deployment. Also the APs aren’t exactly sold at K-Mart Blue Light special pricing but it’s a start.

That barely scratches the surface of what WISPS need to get into the alley ways and kick some butt. I have my own ideas about what’s needed and they are evolving almost daily. I threw the down the gauntlet a few months ago with S.P.I.R.I.T.  It was designed within the limitation of existing technologies at the time. However, many things have changed since then. One proposal we submitted with Cielo Systems a year ago was based on S.P.I.R.I.T. and cost about $10M to cover about 40 square miles.  As I see new products come out, I’ve been updating the spreadsheet to reflect that. If I were doing the same thing today, the cost would be down to about $6M with a massive security and mobile infrastructure geared around a municipal system. Take that out and make it a WISP model only and the cost drops to about $4M, or $3M plus residential truck rolls depending on where you put the Capex. I suspect that with some additional work, I could get it down to about $2.5M now. The difference is that the available capacity is now about 200Mbps per AP location versus our original 100Mbps. However, if this system got to redesign all the manufacturing equipment from scratch, integrated known and future technologies, including handling interference issues, the cost would drop to a deployed cost less than $50K per square mile and would have fiber capacities per AP in terms of speed.

I’m not saying that $50K per square mile is still financially feasible as a pure profit play (as an average cost), but that means some areas could be a lot less, others more. I can see getting the cost down to less than $2500 per square mile in many situations (Arizona is a good example). Just imagine if you can deliver 50Mbps per house consistently at Ubiquiti prices and how that affects your ROI and ability to compete. I’d like to see that someday but at the pace that the industry is currently getting there, I might be too old to climb a ladder when it does. It’s time to start over and grab the Legos, we have some building to do. Even worse, with Hostess filing to go out of business, we need to do it before my supply of Twinkies and HoHos runs out.

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At WISPAPALOOZA this year, I was asked to be one of the speakers at the User WISP presentation (which had more than 500 attendees).  Although we go to WISPA to learn from others, which I did, I also learned some things about my operations that I hadn’t thought about before. Putting together a PowerPoint presentation about your company is a great way to step outside and look back in. If you think through all the facets of the company, where you are, where you are going, what’s working, what’s not working, and put that to paper to explain it to others, you find that there are many things about your company that you have overlooked or just take for granted.

One of the things that I discovered about our operations around PowerPoint slide 7 in my first presentation (in addition to the realization that I really hate making PowerPoint slides) is that in our operations we take responsibility for our clients from fingertips to web site.  Client support-creep became a reality after a couple years when we realized that client viruses, spamming, malware, and file-sharing, mostly running unknown to the client, were tearing up our limited bandwidth, adding to our support costs and time, and giving a negative impression to some clients, even if we weren’t the cause.  Most calls to our clients related to service slowing down, computer re-directing, computer crashing, and other maladies that we were getting blamed for. It seemed like we were getting blamed for all downtime on the face of the earth. Since their neighbor (who had Qwest) did not have problems, it was clearly our fault.

We looked at several options and decided to get a Barracuda Web Filter to clean up some of these issues. Several of our clients were immediately blocked from Internet access, resulting in very unhappy phone calls to us.  Apparently there was no way that their computer was infected since it worked just fine yesterday. The fact that they were running free anti-virus on their Windows ME computer, neither of which had been updated since D-Day, surely didn’t figure into any of this.  Of course our guys wanted to tell some of the most belligerent clients that if they would stop surfing certain sites in Eastern Europe and Asia, they would probably have fewer problems. A lot of tongues were bitten in tech support while diplomatically working with the clients through this process.

Computer viruses: main cause of broadband slowdown

Since our sister company is an IT support operation, we sent the boys in to start checking computers and to come up with a plan. We found at first that viruses were the majority of the problems followed malware and spyware. False positives could occur on the Web filter and still do but it’s very rare and Barracuda figures out the why very.  What we needed was a plan to help our clients clean up their computers, isolate the false positives, and prevent them from re-occurring.  Our favorite corporate anti-virus solution at the time was Symantec, so we recommended it (however, with the investment of the Chinese into Symantec, we no longer recommend them for corporate clients).  We spent a lot of time on-site running Symantec in safe-mode to get some of the more stubborn viruses in the early days.  In a few cases, we just told the customer to take the computer to save their data, reformat their hard drives and start over.

However, free is a tempting price and even though we were suggesting Symantec, AVG and other free anti-virus programs got passed around though word of mouth.  The real problem we had with these programs wasn’t so much whether they were really good at keeping the computer clean, it was more so that many computers were very old or lack sufficient memory.  The free programs in general were  inefficient and the computers would run more slowly than they already were (you aren’t living the dream unless you’ve watched Windows XP boot with 128MB of RAM).  Many of the computers also had one or more clean-up programs that put even more strain on resources which again, became our fault.  It was at this time that we figured we needed to make this problem ours and come up with a standardized setup that we could easily support, similar to that of our biggest corporate clients.  Since Barracuda was already providing a malware product (Malware Bytes today for those of you without a Barracuda box) for anyone who got infected and Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) grew up to be a real full-service protection product and it was free (gotta love that), that was what we standardized on.  Microsoft also makes a great bootable scanning and removal tool call Windows Defender Offline for the more stubborn problems.

Our techs now check out the computers on the system during time of installation. If they are underpowered, we tell them that. If there are 10,000 programs and 5000 Toolbar buttons on the screen, our techs go through installed programs and give the customer a list of what needs to be removed.  They also ask them to uninstall any anti-virus program that isn’t MSE and install that for them.  This whole process takes about 10-15 minutes.  I know that may be a long time to a busy installer and may not be in their skill set in the beginning.  However, it also means pretty much NO tech support calls from that point on for infected machines and our techs get to chat with the client for a few minutes.  We now can have less than 1 call per hundred clients per week on computer issues because of that process and our oversell rate clean computers averages about 25-1 average.  In addition, by spending time with the customer, giving their dog Milk Bones (greatest ice-breaker out there for dog owners and standard in the van), and then telling the customer if they have problems or questions, call us immediately, they are more patient with us if there are issues later.  If they have questions or problems during or after their clean-up process, we log in to their computers, and take over.  About 1 in 20 customers requires these extra few minutes right after install.  And no, our guys are not allowed to look at web histories under condition of future unemployment opportunities.

Getting clients to think of us as their friend

Part of this process is selling ourselves to them that we are the experts and their friend.  This is in comparison to Fred, the neighbor who bought his first computer when he retired 2 years ago and now considers himself to be an “expert”.

We tell them that we have a Fortune 500 security filter in place to help protect them from surfing infected sites. These are usually sites trying to load malware or viruses looking for their personal or financial information. In some cases, we will show them the front top page of the Barracuda Web Filter to show them how many things we stop on a daily basis. In addition, we also tell them that MSE is free and if they have a problem, we provide an additional malware tool for free. The result is that they save up to $100 a year not paying for those types of programs. That keeps them from loading a bunch of other programs that may have a hidden agenda.  By the time we are done, the client believes that we are the experts and we are giving them the straight scoop. It’s hard to get a person to trust a strange technician over their friend, but this process creates that foundation. It also helps if you are involved with other security groups as a consultant or member (for example, Infragard, a public-private partnership that includes institutions such as the FBI) and you mention that to the client.

To maintain the relationship with our clients, we publish a newspaper and starting December 1, will be publishing a one-article flyer every month. I’ve gotten to where I can write them in an hour and there is never a shortage of material.  Scan the antivirus websites, security sites, muniwireless.com, Slashdot.org, WISPA forums, manufacturer forums, Google alerts, etc., and topics just pop out.  Currently, the bank attacks by Iranian hackers are the big topic. We tell our customers that this is just one example.

The newsletter is written in a first person format that is less formal than standard marketing material, similar to these articles. I want people to feel comfortable calling us. It puts them at ease and in many cases, prevents them from making a mistake which would take us a while to fix. The most important thing is that we want them to refer us to their friends since that is the best marketing tool of all.

I thought I would share one of our newsletters to provide an example of what we do.  As you can see, there is a specific target here that should get a few people thinking on how they spend their money.  Our focus is price since CenturyLink decided that it was the best way to keep their customers from jumping ship:

Triad Wireless Newsletter – December 2012

We have been very, very busy over the summer preparing for everyone coming back for another year.  I would like to thank those of you who have signed back up for Triad Wireless Internet again and hope that the improved performance meets your expectations.  To handle the increased use of online video services, we have upgraded our capacity by a factor of 5 over last year. This improvement will be most notable when you are watching NetFlix or any of the online video services.  And we aren’t done.

I thought I would also take this time to discuss the DSL bundle since I’ve had several people ask me about it.  Currently, many of you have taken what you thought was a money-saving bundle from CenturyLink.  This package includes telephone service, internet service, and a Dish Network TV service.  In most cases, the combination of all these services probably cost well over $100 and could be as high as $150.  I’m going to tell you that the CenturyLink DSL service in Tucson Estates and the Foothills, isn’t exactly state-of-the-art.  Unfortunately, the DSL service goes over the telephone wires and most of that is older than my 1978 Pontiac Trans Am.  The end result is that DSL service is limited to 640Kbps to 7Mbps with most folks around 3Mbps.  Since NetFlix takes 1.5Mbps minimum for a decent High-Definition picture, that is sometimes a problem for some people.  If it rains, it gets even worse or drops completely.

However, the biggest issue with the bundle is the cost of paying for something you simply don’t need.   For example, Dish Networks or Direct TV, which you would already be using if you have a CenturyLink DSL bundle, have packages that start from $19.95.  The more common package is $24.95 per month with 190 channels and HD.  If you are like most of us who watch the major stations and maybe one or two news station, that’s a pretty complete package.

On the phone side, most of us already have cellular phones so having a home phone is redundant.  The wireline phone is also expensive because even if it’s “free” with your bundle, the bundle is already costing you over $100 per month and there are a lot of taxes added in that you just don’t need to be paying.  I know how hard it is to cut the cord but think how much you might save if you don’t do a lot of local calling and can stay within your cellular minutes program.  For those of you who still do faxing, that can now be done over the internet with a scan/fax service or with an Ooma box.

An Ooma box is a wireline telephone to Internet adapter that lets you use your Princess Phone, even if you don’t have a phone line.  An Ooma box costs for around $175 from Best Buy, Amazon, or any electronics outfit.  You get a real phone number and unlimited calls in the U.S. free.  If you really, really still like your fax machine, Ooma works great with fax machines.  Although some of your also use MagicJack, that requires that your computer stay on all the time to receive calls.

As for the Internet, Triad Wireless Internet peak speeds are already faster than ADSL and we are still improving.  The difference is that the cost is still $18 per month when paying for the entire year or $20 per month for 6 months.  If you add that cost to getting a basic Satellite TV package directly Dish or Direct, drop your voice line or get an Ooma box, then your total costs per month are now about $50-$55 per month if we include all the sales taxes that Dish adds to your bill.  Triad Wireless Internet has no taxes, its flat rate.

For those of you who are new to Triad Wireless Internet service, we have a new installation program that will save you even more.  For a fee of $249.95, we will have an installer come out to your house, install all the equipment, and then give you 6 months of free internet.  This includes WiFi that will work throughout your house and connect up all your wireless devices.  You can connect multiple computers, printers, and TV sets to the system.  If you are a winter visitor, then when you come back, your next 6 months of high-speed internet will only cost $120 or $20 per month.  For those of you who are full-time residents, after 6 months, you can renew as many months as you like for as little as $18 per month.  The end result of this is that you could high speed internet, Satellite TV, and save $50-$100 per month over what you are paying now.  In addition, you will get far better support from our staff.  This also includes some of your own residents that help out.  With our security system, which CenturyLink does not have, you could have a much more secure, safer internet.”

This flyer is our first direct assault on CenturyLink but it won’t be the last.  We want the client to believe that we are their new best computer friend (BCF) that they have.  Nobody fires their friends.  In exchange, we are back to experiencing 30% growth rates, a higher retention rate, and significantly lower tech support time.  This doesn’t work for everyone or every area.  The fact is that some clients will take advantage of this type of extra service.  We haven’t experienced any problems yet but handling a few hundred customers in an area is different than handling a few thousand.  However, it differentiates us from the wireline carriers, especially CenturyLink who I’m such a big fan of as many of you may know.  I’m targeting their client base directly with the sole intention of taking them completely out of our area.  To keep the clients they have in our area by next summer, they will have to give the service away, throw in free car washes for life, and take momma to church every Sunday.  If you want to really want to pick a market share fight, start with the biggest $40 Billion dollar gorilla on the block.  Subsidies, we don’t need no stinkin’ subsidies.

Since most people that just get internet, the Unbundlers, only get us and CenturyLink, that’s what we are targeting.  The idea was to find their weakness and hit them as hard as possible.  The first weakness is price to which they responded to this year.  We have responded back with the truth about their service and fees and raised the bet with better performance, increased security, and better customer support.  However, ADSL is weak and easy to go after.  VDSL is a whole lot tougher.  Right across the street from us, VDSL is 20+Mbps through CenturyLink.  That area is my target next year once I’ve saturated my area and finished our system upgrade.  This leaves bundlers to the cable companies and higher speed users.  I’m good with that.

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Tales from the Towers, Chapter 39: WISPA exhaustion

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If you haven’t been to WISPAPALOOZA before, be prepared to find out it’s nothing like your father’s WISPAPALOOZA.  This event was so full of activities, speakers, and new information that I think WISPA kept Vegas awake, not the other way around.  If you think Las Vegas is a vacation when WISPA is there, think again.  For all of us who have been to conventions, this is more like hanging around with 1000 friends who want to help you make your business better.  Even though I have to admit to watching a couple of playoff games with the Giants embarrassing the Tigers (maybe Obama can get Detroit a bailout for Justin Verlanders arm since he is a union member), it just meant staying up later to discuss even more ideas.  I literally didn’t get more than 4-6 hours of sleep on this trip any night and I wasn’t even at the hotel to experience the fire alarm treatment.  I finally sent a postcard to the Blackjack dealers on Thursday and told them I would try to stop by next trip.

I want to throw out a thank you for all the vendors who sponsored the different meals that were provided.  The food was excellent and bountiful.  It also destroyed any chance I had of fitting in my short pants for my vacation next month.  The service was even exceptional with the hotel staff in the convention center demonstrating probably the friendliest presentation I’ve seen.  Rick Harnish and the WISPA staff did a great job selecting this hotel and putting on the event.  Cambium could have sprung for a bit more of the roast beast at their shindig though.  When I got my first helping, the chief told me it was very lean.  I didn’t think he meant the availability so which meant no seconds.  I’ll have to bring two plates next time.  Guess they don’t want pictures of fat guys like me climbing towers putting up the new 450s.

Volunteering for several presentations has the downside of missing several other presentations that I wanted to see.  I heard good things about several of them and the videos are going to help.  It would be nice to put better audio/video systems together since the value of the material and experienced presented would be well worth whatever extra cost might be necessary to make that happen.  I also think they could be a revenue producer by charging for downloading the material.  I’m waiting for the videos that were done to come out to see if I need to get a new barber and if my Barney Fife Security Powerpoint slide was a hit or miss.

Conversations on this trip ranged from funding to interference to new products.  Then there was Trango who got the mistaken idea that we wanted to hear Hip-Hop music at ear-splitting volume in the main vendor room.  If you think I’m joking, just look for the YouTube video of the other vendors faces while it was going on (just kidding , the video is being held back to protect the offended).  It was so loud, you couldn’t hear the person speaking in front of you. I was reciting my recipe for spaghetti and the consultant I was talking to thought I insulted his sister.

I get it, I’m old, boring, and an engineer.  I would rather listen to Boston than some guy spitting in a microphone.  Melody and tone somewhere in sync, create a pleasing experience for me.  I don’t want to hear records being spun backwards at full volume while I’m in a customer sales meeting unless I’m listening for messages from the beyond the grave (1970s reference to all the urban legends that spooky messages could be heard by spinning records backwards).  Maybe it’s me but that’s kind of a distraction.  Whoever thought that was a good idea clearly didn’t understand their target audience and should be a huge lesson to all of us.  If you are trying to sell something, create an environment that is pleasant, not one that makes your clients’ ears bleed.  Holding meetings at the local night club featuring Kaskade is not going to result in a sale if the client can’t hear you pitch your idea.

 Ubiquiti shows off new products

So what I get out of the show that I didn’t know?  Ubiquiti showed off some new products that should increase the bottom line and talked further about products that they already announced.  Things like the NanoBridge HP and Air Gateway, a low-cost clip indoor AP that attaches to the power supplies on Nanobridges means I’ll be making more money on my installs.  Although having less expensive client radios is a big issue, I see using them more as low-cost backhaul for my microcell models.  The Air Gateway is my short term personal favorite though, as something that will enhance my short term ability to get new clients and make more money.  I also learned that staying with family on business trips and trying to do Powerpoint slides at night are not compatible when your brother’s bulldog is now your new best friend and has intestinal issues.

What was interesting was seeing that WISPs aren’t the only people attending WISPA.  Ubiquiti going public and the Titanic-like sinking of its stock price (check out UBNT) means that many of my new investment friends finally want to know what’s happening in the industry. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the lawsuits that are now coming out of the woodwork against Ubiquiti and all the productive things that lawyers do for businesses in this country. Yes, it’s good to have a partner agreement or client contract that is solid.  However, instead of suing Ubiquiti for getting counterfeited, how about suing the federal government for letting the Chinese steal every intellectual property our entrepreneurs have developed and not imposing penalties? Even better, sue the Chinese government for looking the other way while corporations like Huawei manufacture cloned products of everything we created.  I say put rules in place that allow product lawyers to sue Chinese companies. That ought to bring their country’s productivity to its knees.  Make damages retroactive to 1980 and let’s see what happens to the manufacturing industry in the U.S.  I could do this all day but my soapbox is making my feet hurt.

 Cambium enhances its Canopy product line

Cambium showed a presentation demonstrating an incremental increase in the Canopy product line with the 450, its capacity, and its non-line of sight (NLOS) capabilities.  My original premise still stands: advanced RF engineering is a requirement for large area tower-centric models, and the 450 has that in spades.  As production and more bands become available for the 450, I’m sure a lot of farm and forest folk are going to be happy to see NetFlix in a higher resolution their old 1960s black and white TV.  The 450 though, uses OFDM and that means to maximize AP efficiency, coverage areas are going to have to shrink. However, even at the extended ranges, the throughput will take Canopy into the next generation.  Of course, if they cheap out on my seconds for Roast Beast again at the Cambium event, I’ll be telling how the plastic in the cases causes warts on your fingers.

 How WISPs can compete with cable and DSL Internet service providers

In my most competitive environment where we compete against cable and DSL, we used to charge a fixed fee for installation and then charge a fee for service.  In this area, we run the system more as a hot-spot billing model instead of a monthly billing model.  The clients can prepay for what they need for 1 day to 12 months.  The longer they prepay, the higher the discount.  I was in the middle of a presentation when I received a text stating that CenturyLink dropped their monthly price and wasn’t charging for installation.  Since I was discussing installation charges earlier with some colleagues and how important it is to cash flow, I decided that a response was needed that didn’t damage our cash flow.  By the time the presentation ended, I announced that our response to CenturyLink’s move was that we were going to charge $249.95 for the installation and give 6 months of free basic internet.  Since we were including AirRouters with the installation to match DSL and cable offerings, AirGateway’s will drop my cost another $20-$25.

This particular model works at $249.95 because we keep the distance of the clients down to ½ mile or less in the vast majority of cases.  This allows us to use Locos instead of Nanostations or NanoBridges.  That brings the cost of the entire installation to between $150-$170.  Since we charge $120 for 6 months of basic service, we are only subsidizing $20-$40 on service over 6 months over our regular service.  Although the rates may differ depending on the area, the goal is to give the customer additional value without disrupting our cash flow significantly. This model is designed to capture 15% of the market in the highest competitive environment imaginable ($18-$20 cable and DSL competitors with no contract and no installation fee).  I think this is the Ground Zero for CenturyLink’s competitive price testing and we are thinking now that we might be able to get to 20% or better.  Early response to this has been extremely positive from the clients who just ordered the service.

Some of you have asked me how I compete with bundled services.  I don’t, it’s not my market.  Let Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner or whoever keep the bundlers and the file-sharing fans.  I don’t like taxes, paperwork, or government.  The hot-spot idea means cash up front, no billing paperwork, and the government doesn’t get a penny (because they would just give it to CenturyLink anyway to compete against me).  My market goal in this type of environment is 15% of the clients.  A competitive pricing model gets you that market share as long as your service works.  There is no way to be price competitive if you need a large support staff for the backend for this type of model.

The next question is how do we keep the distances to ½ mile and keep our costs down?  We use houses as AP sites.  Tower-centric models don’t work in urban and city environments.  The technology just isn’t there for 10,000 clients off a tower in a low-noise environment within a city.  As the population density increases, so does interference. Your chances of getting a clean signal to the client at 5 miles dramatically decreases. The microcell model is the only financial model I’ve been able to make work on paper and in practice.  Mesh models don’t’ make financial sense (if you are looking to make a profit) as many bankrupt companies and cities have found. They are too expensive to install and maintain. A microcell model is two magnitudes cheaper and focuses the capex where it delivers the highest revenue per investment.

Many of you don’t like to use houses as AP sites.  I get that since I’ve had issues like a customer unplugging everything and then leaving for Taiwan for a month.  He forgot he was an AP location and was trying to protect his equipment.  We now have site lease agreements which guarantee that a neighbor either has keys or we place everything outside so we have access and never enter unattended properties without a pre-approved chaperone.  We also have a battery box that can go on a roof and keep the equipment running in case the power is turned off for an extended period of time.  No, it’s not the most professional but it’s gets you into areas where towers may not be available or line of sight (LOS) is difficult because of trees. The short distance also makes NLOS more reasonable for 900MHz and 2.4GHz, even in high interference environments.  If the client has increased usage, then add a breaker box outside and even a meter if it makes financial sense.

We typically give the client free internet in exchange for this co-location service and there is no shortage of people who want Internet service for free.  For every customer we sign up this way, we expect at least 10 paying clients per antenna at a minimum of $20 per month.  Theoretically we could support 30-50 clients depending on how much bandwidth we need to give to be competitive.  Total cost for this AP installation was about $450 not including our 2 hours of labor.

This design is now being upgraded further with both 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz.  Since trees are obviously not our biggest issue in this particular area, we can put everyone on 5GHz and use the 2.4GHz for a large area hot-spot.  That means picking up renters and guests and actually creating close to a mesh-type WiFi model.  The higher gain 2.4GHz antennas are already picking up customers at 500-800 feet who don’t have outdoor radios.  We have been supplementing those with WiFi stations from Ubiquiti for the longer range users, but apparently we are the only people on the planet that found a use for those.  Oh well, that means lots of left over inventory until we saturate the area.

The WISP market needs to expand. Wireline is creeping into the rural areas, fiber is great but not cost-effective for most areas yet, and bandwidth needs are going up.  I left out a few additional issues that we resolved such as backhaul, bandwidth, and additional services we will offer in the near future.  The goal is to build a system that gives WISPs a chance to take the fight to wireline, not hide from it.  ’m tired of wireline companies that subvert the free market system via with government subsidies. CenturyLink is the poster boy for that, although Verizon and AT&T are just as guilty. If they want a fight, I believe that this model is the next weapon against them with next generation 802.11 products ramping up to be a pain in the neck of the telecom incumbents. We just need to apply them.

For those of you who were at WISPAPALOOZA and stayed awake during my presentations, you have already heard most of this. For others who have asked for a copy of my Powerpoint slides, believe me, they are functionally useless without my smiling face describing why a picture of Barney Fife has meaning to your business. I do believe they are going to get posted eventually, so good luck with that.  I enjoyed meeting many of you and definitely learned a whole bunch more.  If you are already in this business or plan on becoming a WISP, don’t miss the next one (okay, a shameless plug but maybe Harnish will influence Cambium to save me seconds on my Roast Beast next show).  Don’t you just love a running gag?

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Ruckus Wireless has released the ZoneFlex 7782-N access point for high density deployments, which features an integrated 30° narrow beam antenna that operates in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. You deploy several of these APs and target them to specific areas in the stadium (as shown below) to deliver much better performance than the old omnidirectional Wi-Fi access points. Operators of wholesale Wi-Fi offloading businesses (like Towerstream) can also use these APs in crowded city areas like Times Square to allow mobile operators to reduce the congestion on their cellular networks, again by targeting the Wi-Fi signal to the spots where many people congregate and tap into their iPhones or iPads.

In the United States, which has hardly any densely populated cities compared to Asia, Latin America and Europe, most of the high density deployments will occur in sports stadiums and outdoor sporting or entertainment locales, convention centers and hotels. In other countries, Ruckus Wireless’s equipment will be used, not just for crowded sporting and entertainment events, but also for providing outdoor Wi-Fi access in city squares and train stations.

Related stories:

Tips on how improve WiFi in conferences and other crowded venues

Ruckus Delivers Smarter Wi-Fi Solutions to Help Service Providers Manage High-Density Wi-Fi Crowds

Ruckus Wireless files for $100M IPO

The post Ruckus Wireless targets high density Wi-Fi deployments appeared first on MuniWireless: WiFi, LTE, 4G.

One wireless ISP provided the following tips:

(1) Plan that each attendee will bring 2 to 3 devices. Thus you need to optimize your network to handle that many devices.

(2) There are two variables that you have to deal with properly to have a successful event: Access and Performance

Access: The worst thing that can happen at an event, is for attendees not to be able to access the Wi-Fi network. Absolutely the WORST! Any event network should be designed to handle the maximum device load at peak times. This usually means utilizing access points of enterprise quality that can sustain large numbers of simultaneous connections. I use Apple Airport Extremes at the events I do as I’ve demonstrated that they can sustain 170 connections, while Apple claims that they can only do 50. When an AP is overloaded, it will refuse any new connections from attendees.

Performance: With respect to performance, you can always depend on the attendees at any event to use whatever bandwidth you provide to the max. Bandwidth for special events can be quite costly. Event organizers have to strike a balance between their budgets and how much they care about giving their attendees a pleasant network experience. Most attendees can deal with slow performance, but they won’t tolerate not being able to access the network.

(3) It’s important to prioritize traffic over whatever bandwidth you provision for the event. This is all about making the best use of a scarce resource. Web traffic for instance, should have priority over file transfers.

(4) Attendees who use things like MiFi at an event should be tracked down and shot! (just kidding) In the real world, you need to figure out a way to get as many of your attendees on 5 GHz as possible. This gets them away from the MiFi and other nonsense that goes on in the 2.4 GHz band that can effect Wi-Fi at any event. I usually set up special SSIDs that work on 5 GHz and tell the event organizers to tell attendees to use those SSIDs if their devices can see them.

Rory Conaway, founder of TriadWireless (a wireless ISP) and author of the popular, Tales from the Towers series on MuniWireless, says when setting up the network one must buy the appropriate equipment and this changes (as well as the number of APs) depending on the size of the room and number of people. Here are his general suggestions for equipment for an event.

1. Small room
(a) 25 people or fewer
Ubiquiti UniFi or pretty much anything on the planet
(b) 25-100 people
Ubiquiti Pro or any dual channel AP. You might need 2 of them.
(c) 100-120 people
Ruckus or Xirrus
2. Large room
(a) 100-300 users
Ubiquiti Unifi
(b) 300-500 users
Ubiquiti Unifi Pro, Ruckus, Xirrus
(c) 500-2000 users
Ruckus, Xirrus
(d) 1000+
Xirrus
3. Large conference rooms
(a) 1000-5000 users
Ruckus, Xirrus
(b) 5000+
Xirrus

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Related Posts:

Why hotel WiFi is being crushed by iPads and what to do to about it

Why conference WiFi sucks and how to improve it (with tips from Tim Pozar)

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If you have other tips on how conference and event organizers can improve the WiFi experience at events, please post them in the comments section below.

The post Tips on how improve WiFi in conferences and other crowded venues appeared first on MuniWireless: WiFi, LTE, 4G.

Although there are 3 or 4 different basic WISP models from tower-centric to microcell to mesh, the lines between these get blurred with the differences between rural, suburban, and city. Take it indoors into buildings like hotels or conference centers, and there are even more specialized tools like centralized controllers, AP switches, and dual-band APs. Add in the cost differential of equipment that ranges from $40 to $12,000 for an AP, and the fact that manufacturers don’t always tell the whole truth, and the confusion level of what to use can become overwhelming.

It takes an immense amount of time and experience to set up a wireless network and to know what will work in your environment. Let’s face it, very few of us have a lab full of RF equipment, an anaerobic chamber, and a network testing environment.  My wife is extremely understanding of my electronic tinkering.  However, my request to have her park her car in the street from now on so I could build an RF anechoic chamber in my garage came with the condition that I would take Ballroom Dancing lessons.  I decided that there are just some things about RF I’m not meant to discover on my own since it’s not worth the price. I also explained to my wife that they don’t make steel-toed high-heel shoes.

We do have a lot of resources though. If you aren’t a member of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) sign up now and get into the email subject lists.  This one is a no-brainer.  If you have to compete with the leeches from CenturyLink who apparently can’t figure out how to be competitive without taxpayers funding their archaic DSL technology, it’s better to have friends on your side.  From there, make sure that you join the Animal Farm Motorola Users Group (AFMUG).  I would say that there are centuries of experience but I’m probably underestimating it.  Also read as many manufacturers’ forums as you can find, for example, Cambium’s and Ubiquiti’s forums.  Mikrotik is also extremely informative but productive criticism of their products will probably mean you will be treated like a Big Gulp in New York City and get banned from the city limits. Email lists with WISPA and AFMUG are also monitored by some of manufacturers who are usually more than willing to jump in and clarify points or questions.

On the business side, there are many new products that have come out that should increase the competiveness and hopefully profits of your WISP business. New products generally ship with delays so if you have the patience of Job and are comfortable with first generation firmware, don’t hesitate.  For example, Ubiquiti’s AirFiber and EdgeMax products don’t support MPLS yet for different reasons.  Cambium’s 450 won’t have 1Gb Ethernet ports until later firmware which should coincide with the PMP 100 compatibility for migration support but who cares, it’s a 90Mbps AP in version 1 of the firmware.  AirCam is still waiting for software that doesn’t require a Supercomputer to watch more than 5 cameras, and the list goes on. The pressure to get products to market as soon as possible means if the first version of firmware can handle 80% of the client needs, the company will work to deliver on the other 20% down the road. It would be nice if the firmware upgrade with the additional features for the last 20% didn’t require a license and more fees though. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You probably don’t want to hold your breath waiting for things to get updated though.  Unforeseen things happen and programmers are more optimistic than Cubs fans.

Manufacturers today are caught between a rock and a hard place.  Missing features mean missing sales.  But bug-infested features, or what I like to call the Express Lane in Production Quality Control (ELPQC), mean more sales up front and a significant amount of bad feeling when the dream turns into a nightmare.  I say hire Klingons for the QC department and they get to challenge the developer to a bat’leth match for every bug that is found.  If the Klingon Worf were running QC for Ubiquiti and Motorola a few years ago, I would have had fewer ulcers today and Motorola’s 320 WiMax engineers would have accumulated fewer frequent flyer miles.  At this point in our industry, the pressure to add features that might work is nowhere near the need to make sure that existing features work properly.

If you are planning on buying bleeding edge products, do research first, then test, test, and test some more.  Make a checklist of the functionalities you need and confirm that they have actually implemented. Post your questions on forums because if you are going to buy the product, it’s probably already been tested by some of your colleagues and they may have strong opinions for or against it.  To clarify though, they will give you their opinions on and off the subject, kind of like these articles.  Online opinions have to be assessed by source and motive.

The catch is that even at 80% functionality, most of the new products are so much better than the last generation for price or performance reasons (Nanostation 5 versus Nanostation 5M, AirFiber versus pretty much anything less than $25K in unlicensed for less than 4 miles), that it’s tough to wait.  So what if Ubiquiti AirFiber is only 700Mbps Full-Duplex in version 1 of the firmware since it cost less than my last dental visit.  It’s a game changer that increased the sales of Sominex versus their competitors.  Kind of like what Tiger Woods did when he turned pro. Now you have to think, “Do I really need to pull that fiber the next mile but what about large packet support?”  If a Cambium 450 can replace a 100 series AP that starts crying every time NetFlix adds another season of Mad Men, it’s not an option; it’s a no-brainer except that feature isn’t ready yet. Edgemax can kick the stuffing out of Cisco, MikroTik, and Juniper but only if we tell Cisco and Juniper to tie their MPLS hands behind their back.   All these issues are planned to be resolved by the manufacturers but unless they post their roadmaps with dates, which are proprietary information, I’d see if Uri Geller is available for consulting.

As for that 20%, hats off to Cambium for admitting the network interface problem delay on the 450 publicly and keeping the 450 product off the market for QC reasons.  That is definitely one difference between Cambium and Motorola.  Motorola would have just said it’s none of your business; you will buy it when we allow you to which explains why Cambium, the Motorola spin-off, has succeeded. Then the rest of Motorola was sold off to someone who knew how to make their patents productive.  That’s also much better than deploying thousands or tens of thousands of feet of cable that have a shorter outdoor life than Dracula in Phoenix in August.  Just offering to replace defective cable after it’s installed is like offering to repair a buddy’s 1963 Ferrari 250GT Spyder California SWB after you borrowed it and wrecked it.  Fixing it doesn’t quite cover the devaluation and he certainly isn’t going to trust you again.

What’s very good for the industry is that competition now means that manufacturers that used to test other competitor’s product quietly are now more open with that information. Although it’s a forum discussion for example, posted by the EdgeMax team, I now know the limits of the MikroTik RB1100AHx2.  That was highly valuable information and I appreciate it.  I and probably most of the new rookies with Mikrotik were not aware that different ports on it have different performance levels because “SOMEBODY“ failed to mention that in the documentation.  The omission of those kinds of facts means that the RB1100AHx2 trust level, if which I’ve deployed 2 so far, is now lower than my former buddy who wrecked my mint 1986 Cougar (yeah, I hold a grudge a long time and the source of my other bad analogy).  At this point, MikroTik should update the data sheets for the RB1100AHx2 with the full story, port by port, verified by an independent lab.  It would also be nice to see a public shootout between routers similar to the shootout at AFMUG on the radios.

After Ubiquiti posted their performance testing numbers, MikroTik responded with some totally amazing numbers that apparently the guys that write router operating systems can’t duplicate.  I figure if they can’t make it work, I’m hosed unless they just aren’t sharing the secret sauce turbo command.  I have to say that I never ever thought of things like which port was fastest.  Mikrotik has been a leader in the industry with low-cost routers that could do everything so my hat is off to what they have accomplished for the industry.  However, I was taught a motto when I was younger: tell all of the truth or tell someone else.

We’ve covered the meat ad nauseum, but what about the potatoes?  Don’t overlook Tycon PoE switches, MikroTik 750’s and probably the 2011’s, and Digital Loggers Mid-Span PoE Injector.  Many of these products were developed specifically for our industry and work great. Ubiquiti has now stuck their fingers in two of these categories which can only make things better for the industry.  If they can get the temperature rating of the next version of EdgeMax above the melting point of butter for outdoor, I’ll be a happy guy.  Can’t put this version in the NEMA box quite yet but I’m probably the 2% of the market that is way down the road.  Since I don’t see a picture of what I want on the Ubiquiti website, it means I’m putting out more MikroTik 750’s for a while and pretty soon, 2011’s in the NEMA boxes.

Tycon power switches are one of the best and toughest products I’ve seen.  The ability to feed the voltage through a single port is huge. Since you don’t have to run separate power leads, it reduces cable and saves money. Also, anything that can survive an Arizona summer on a white roof inside a NEMA box gets two thumbs up in my book.  We measured roof temperatures of 135 degrees Fahrenheit which means with solar loading, the NEMA box is at least 150F.

I’ve been using Digitial-Loggers IP Power switches for years and just got in the new Mid-Span PoE.  I’m hoping the quality is better than the original IP Power switches which aren’t manufactured any longer.  I’ve got the newer IP Power switches ones in and haven’t had any failures yet in about a year so maybe they got it right.  The Mid-Span PoE is a whole different animal and is optimized for WISPs with DC power, backup power, etc. I’ll install my first one this week but others have had pretty good reviews of it.

There are several other new products that I’m still playing with like the Rocket M5 Titanium, Xirrus XR-2420, and the new version of Patronsoft FirstSpot. The Xirrus seems to do everything automatically except cook my breakfast. I may become obsolete if everybody built their firmware with this many automated features. The Titanium is still waiting for a sibling for more throughput testing but I’ll have details on the other stuff by next article. Ran the Titanium with the Xirrus and it hit 72Mbps with a single windows file transfer in 5.8GHz but I think my laptops were the limiting factor there. One of these days I’ll buy something newer than 3 years old. The Rocket 5Ms are about 54Mbps in the same test. Didn’t have time to test anything else but it gives me a good idea that the Titanium is definitely faster than the Rocket and that the Cavium processors in the Xirrus rock. So many toys, so little time.

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Tales from the Towers, Chapter 37: Talk is cheap but Ebay is cheaper

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Tales from the Towers, Chapter 39: WISPA exhaustion

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Meanwhile, broadband is broadband for many consumers and businesses – who do not see the difference, nor what is possible with ultra-fast broadband (e.g. fiber / Fiber-to-the-Home). On the other hand, organizations like US Ignite are forming to promote “Next generation Applications,” specifically new applications in education, healthcare, clean energy, public safety, and workforce development, including advanced manufacturing. These require the ultra-fast broadband connectivity which the networks being rolled out today will provide. And before we get to “Next generation applications,” consider the bandwidth required to support online collaboration so critical to being competitive in a 21st century economy.

In the following white paper by Doug Adams and Michael Curri, SNG applies its own experience and findings with accepted technology marketing theories to better explain why, when it comes to introducing ultra-fast broadband, “build it” is merely step one of technology adoption.

Read the complete whitepaper, No Field of Dreams: Eliminating the Waiting Game and Driving Uptake>>

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