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Mobile & Wireless
NXTComm 2008: Zhone reviving muni Wi-Fi
Latest technology, telco-grade reliability fuel vendor’s system
by Jim Barthold
Don’t stop reading because you think you’ve heard this
before, but Zhone Technologies thinks this time it really has
the answer to municipal Wi-Fi.
Despite the fact that the most prominent of these networks,
Wireless Philadelphia, burned out more spectacularly than
Detroit on Halloween, Zhone believes there’s not only life in
the market but it can flourish and is showing off its belief at
this year’s NXTComm 2008 in Las Vegas.
“Sometimes it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese,”
said Steven Glapa, Zhone’s vice president of marketing and
product management.
Zhone’s proposal aims primarily at telcos who would use the
technology — including dual-mode 2.4 GHz/4.9 GHz access
points — to attract municipal anchor tenants such as police,
fire, surveillance and other community services and then to
sweeten other private broadband service offerings with Wi-Fi
that complements wireline.
“In the last year or so we found a tremendous amount of
interest in what the fixed-mobile convergence means to these
kinds of operators. We noticed there’s a whole set of
applications in the municipal environment, a combination of
government and commercial that suggests Wi-Fi coverage is
a good idea. The world hasn’t quite seen that come to fruition
successfully every time,” Glapa said.
That’s an understatement. Zhone’s proposal, called
SkyZhone, considers what went wrong with both business
models and technology and approaches the space from a new
direction.
From a business model perspective, Zhone believes that a
public-private combination will be most viable for keeping
down costs and bringing in payback. Technologically, the
vendor is using the latest 802.11n MIMO antenna technology
along with Ethernet in the first mile and bonded DSL for
backhaul to provide what Glapa described as “telco grade”
reliability. Finally, he said, Zhone cuts costs and enhances
reliability by using line powering for the network.
The system also builds on Zhone’s wireline-based Multi-
Service Access Platform (MSAP) that “allows service providers
to build out Wi-Fi coverage where they think it will help
provide a nice sticky application to increase customer loyalty
for their broadband customers without having to worry about it
being a complete standalone business,” Glapa said.
Wi-Fi, “despite the stubbed toe” of first-generation municipal
efforts, still has lots of life left in it, he said.
“We’re seeing a fair amount of excitement about it on the
part of telcos who see the proposition as valuable both from
their own commercial purposes and snaring revenue upside
with very little investment … adding this as a sticky service to
help reduce churn,” he said. “It offers a new approach to the
public-private partnership angle because it’s just so much
more capable of supporting municipal applications at lower
cost than what we call muni Wi-Fi version 1.0.”
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