Skip to main content

A tale of two uses...Fixed Wireless Access

Having experienced two extremes recently it got me thinking about Fixed Wireless Access.

Not so many months ago I finally got my PSTN service connected to my house in Bangkok. This was after almost one year of waiting for someone to either cancel their service or for one of the two main providers to install more hardware to expand capacity. As you can imagine both scenarios are extremely unlikely and if a circuit did become available it was not guaranteed to be close enough to have good performance on ADSL service piggy backing on the same line.

So that's scenario 1: massive population with little incentive by the operators to expand and invest in copper wire.

Scenario 2: just go back from a two week holiday in New Zealand, awesome place, and scattered townships of small populations separated by hundreds of kilometers of scenery. Very nice for the camera, not so good for the telco.

Having said that NZ Telecom have made substantial investments in both wired and wireless access. I can use my phone most of the way up the Tongariro Volcano and all of the way into the Mount Cook National Park. All very commendable but is it sustainable.

No I'm sure that in their planning NZ Telecom have planned for network expansion and so there will be spare capacity on the drop points; but....

There is a large transient community in NZ based in camper vans, mostly foreigners but also locals. This got me thinking about a use to Fixed Wireless Access. Let's say that each community (or for the larger towns each sub-community) had a cell for fixed wireless. This was tried in the UK in the mid 90's by Ionica but they got their demographic a bit wrong so they folded. Now I can connect new homes very quickly by expanding the cell's footprint without laying large amounts of cable. I could also, in theory, add transceivers to the camper vans so they can connect to the PSTN network whilst based in the community.

The first scenario lends itself to the model as ongoing investment would be reduced as capacity grows in the cell. I don't need to make the already bad roads worse with more tarmac patches as I lay more copper in the group or string yet more cables from the already overloaded street poles (any visitors to Bangkok will understand what I'm talking about).

I guess the question mark for Bangkok would be how sensitive the system is to rain fall. In a country that has a 6 to 8 month rainy season more often than not the UBC Digital Satellite service suffers from signal loss in the rain, not a great solution as you can imagine. While you're at throw some WiMax hardware on those cell towers and feed me IPTV :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PC over IP - The Teradici Effect

Teradici are hoping to blur the lines between PC and Data Centre. Their solution allows a use to view multiple screens and control the blade PC over IP. This is kind of like the dumb terminals with a new edgy deployment. The intention is that all of the computing power is performed offsite in a centralized area, the Data Centre, and this will save on power and maintenance costs as the engineers are co-located with the hardware and therefore don't have to go out to the client site for basic maintenance. The Teradici Company Article found in the Wall Street Journal

e-Olympics

This year's Olympics should be the best ever for coverage. Fring are looking for onsite commentators and as a means to encourage people are offering a 3.5G phone as your reporters tool. I hope that this will be the games of the micro blog. The potential for services like Twitter or Jaiku to open up access to the games in a way never seen before is encouraging. Essentially there are three dimensions to the games: Nation Event Athlete Typically broadcast of the games ha content defined by the nation. The USA channels closely follow the USA squad, the same for UK, NZ Australia etc. This is targeted at the national pride. For those people who are actively engaged in an event themselves, marathon, it's the event that is king. There will still be an element of "my country" but this is equally balanced by "my sport". The final element is the followers of a specific athlete. Friends, family and fans may elect to follow all of the events surrounding a person. ...

Cashless Society? Micropayments up for disruption

New Zealand, although small, is a long way ahead in many aspects compared to the UK. Some of their new schemes are being adopted by the UK government. What I remember from my first trip here 6 years ago was the impact of the EFTPOS system. Long before the UK was using Chip and PIN New Zealand was moving towards a cashless society with the ubiquitous EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer Point of Sale) cards and terminals. The system is good and robust. But the one place you can't find it for some of those micropayments is on the public transport system. Buses would benefit from some form of electronic payment system. There is one drawback of the system in it's implementation today, the time taking to pay. For small payments, say a Moro (think Mars) Bar at the local dairy (corner shop) is the time taken for the system to recognise the card and for the user to select the account (Cheque, Savings or Card) and input their PIN. This would certainly slow down the boarding process...