Future growth demands wireless ISPs
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(InfoWorld) - Aspiring entrepreneurs can only dream about a track record like Selina Loâs. First there was Centillion, a networking startup that Lo co-founded, and Bay Networks purchased for $100 million in 1994. Loâs next act was Alteon, a maker of Gigabit Ethernet adapters that Lo joined in 1996 and transformed into Alteon WebSystems, a maker of content-aware switching hardware, before helping to sell Alteon to Nortel at the apex of the dot-com craze in July, 2000, for $7.8 billion. It was a master stroke of good marketing and good timing that made Lo very wealthy. With two big wins under her belt, Lo is swinging for the fences with her next company: Ruckus Wireless, which makes hardware for broadcasting voice, video, and data over Wi-Fi connections. In a chat with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts last week, Lo said that getting wireless networking off the ground in the United States may be her biggest challenge yet. InfoWorld: Howâd you start out in IT?                                                     SelinaÂ Lo: I came to [the United States] as a foreign student and started out as an English major. At that time, I wanted to get a good education and return to Hong Kong to each in high school. Then my family immigrated to this country, and, all of a sudden, I had to deal with the fact that I might not be going back to Hong Kong. I learned how the U.S. public schools are and, hey, I didnât want to starve, so I moved over to computer science. I figured, âI gotta get my moneyâs worth out of this.â My first job out of school was at HP, where I worked from 1985 to 1990. That was a good time to be at HP. There was high growth and lots of stuff happening. But I had always wanted to work for a small company, so I joined NET (Network Equipment Technologies), which at that time was a 2,000 person company in Redwood City, [Calif.]. I was in charge of NETâs packet switching engine, and they had a license deal with this little company called Cisco that had just come on the scene, so I was able to watch Cisco grow up from being a very small company that was still being run by its founders. IW: What did you learn from Cisco? SL: Back then, Cisco hired incredibly good people. Most companies have a lot of average employees. But in the early days, all the Cisco hires were brilliant people. At that time, they were also very open with their customers who, at that time, were the IT guys in the major universities. These guys all got together and gave Cisco very open feedback. So I learned the value of word of mouth around this community of pretty technical and influential users, what Cisco used to call âthe lunatic fringe.â It taught me about having customers participate in process and not being too formal about it. IW: Now youâre in the wireless space. How did the idea for Ruckus come about? SL: After l left Nortel, I was at home and had to have these TVs installed, and there were all these guys running wires and ripping holes in the ceilings and I thought, âWhy not do this wirelessly?â At that time, the market for video over IP was small compared to the overall Wi-Fi market. But there was part of me that just said, âYouâve been pretty successful. You can afford to have a failure.â So I funded two engineers I met who were working on a wireless video transmission project and we set up the company. IW: Do you worry that the complexity of the U.S. telecom market will inhibit your ability to grow? SL: I do worry about the telecommunications environment, and thatâs why Ruckus isnât just IPTV. If you look at whatâs going on in the world, fundamentally, Wi-Fi will eventually blanket the globe. Right now, people like hotspots, but thereâs no business model there. I think that will change and consumers will get the point where they will pay for Wi-Fi outside their home and work. But the [United States] is so stagnant. If we count on big corporations to do things, forget about it. IW: You seem to have this ability to adapt what youâre doing. Why is that? SL: Well, I was brought up in Hong Kong, and thatâs just an incredibly opportunistic business environment where hype is a major aspect of how you do business. People just move from one trend to another. Itâs part of life â spotting trends â and itâs something you just absorb as a way of doing business.
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Several wireless networking standards are vying for a center spot in consumers' homes. Here we take you on a tour of some of the most likely candidates.
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By Duncan Martell MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.  - Wireless services will lead the next growth phase of the Internet as venture capitalists who helped fund the early boom open their wallets again, industry leaders said Monday.
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By Anonymous  No sooner has the market for consumer electronics devices incorporating Wi-Fi begun to gain real traction than another, based on high-speed connections via 3G cellular technologies or mobile WiMAX, is starting to take shape.
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By Harry Liu  THE demand for Triple Play over Internet protocol (IP) for data, voice and video convergence is now a basic necessity for many customers.
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As travelers spend billions online, Internet options keep growing.
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Wireless broadband gets a boost with optimized EV-DO installations in several regions.
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Municipal Wi-Fi, full of promise and hype over the past two years, has hit the wall of reality in the U.S. because of economics, politics and even the technology.
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Long-range wireless networking technology draws market interest as low-cost service.
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... into the rarefied air of wireless service providers, that is.
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Wireless companies are upping their technology bets.
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NEW YORK - Coming soon could be a wireless broadband world in which consumers get to pick any smartphone or other device and load any software on it - not have to take what the wireless carrier wants to sell.
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(Source: AT&T)  Faced with management complexities, rising costs and fierce competition, more enterprises are relying on emerging technologies such as wireless fidelity (WiFi), citywide wireless service (WiMAX) and radio frequency identification (RFID). These are just some of the findings of a recent Ziff Davis Media survey of companies with 1,000 or more employees.
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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The largest U.S. wireless service provider commits billions to network data speed upgrades.
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A year ago, it seemed like just about every major U.S. city was drawing up ambitious plans to build wireless Internet networks so more people, both rich and poor, could have online access wherever they wanted.
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Great innovations in wireless technologies have arrived in recent years, and their effect has yet to be realized. But those innovations may be hindered by thinking that an even better innovation is just around the corner.