Independent of the regulatory challenges, even small scale community WiFi networks very hard to pull off. Shaddi (of TIER fame) wrote about this a few years back. He concludes, "I'm not saying mesh networks don't work ever...What I am saying is that unplanned wireless mesh networks never work at scale." Related: http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-access-and-wi-fi-alwa... On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM, ashish makani <ashish.makani@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Folks
Came across this interesting story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-telecom-giants-take-s...
Excerpt: "The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.
The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google,Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor."
This proposal is in the US, but would be interesting to see, if developing countries with big user bases, could also use large scale public wi-fi n/ws instead of/in addition to, mobile telephony n/ws.
Also, what about the relative costs of building a large scale public wifi n/w as opposed to a mobile telephony n/w, in a world where increasingly data dominates voice.
cheers ashish
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