ISP competition -- testing a Time Warner Cable public WiFi access site

As mentioned earlier, a welcome bit of infrastructure deployment competition seems to brewing between the telephone and cable companies. At the Mobile World Congress last week, Philips and Ericsson announced WiFi-ready streetlights and a coalition of five cable companies has formed to roll out open WiFi hotspots.

I am a Time Warner Cable (TWC) customer, so I decided to try it out. I checked in my neighborhood and found a WiFi hotspot at a school two blocks from my house. I drove over, parked on the street in front of the school and logged in using my TWC account credentials. I had a solid, five-bar connection (whatever that means).

I ran Speedtest, which showed 16 ms ping time, 40.6 mbps download and 5.06 mbps upload -- considerably faster than the service at my home.

Our phones are able to switch seamlessly between WiFi and the cellular network (see, for example, Republic Wireless). I do not want to be bothered knowing which I am using at any time -- I just want my phone to pick the best connection available given my ISP terms and the application I am running.

I've beaten up on TWC and the other ISPs for exploiting their non-competitive markets in many blog posts, so it is only fair that this post congratulate them on providing a meaningful, competitive service.

Today the five-ISP coalition lists 200,000 hotspots in their database. How many will they have in five years? Might the cable companies have outsmarted the phone companies in splitting up mobile and landline access?
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Update 4/12/2014

Comcast has revealed that they have a million public access points, with at least 800,00 of them in the homes of their broadband subscribers and, if they succeed in acquiring Time Warner, that footprint will expand significantly.

We may be witnessing a race between cable companies deploying WiFi and phone companies deploying 4G (and later 5G) infrastructure. That might lead to increased competition or, more likely, they will gerrymander access so as to limit competition (following the example of the U. S. House of Representatives).

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Update 5/29/2014

FON's public WiFi routers are gaining steam. I've had one of their dual-SSID routers for years, but never used it because there are so few in my neighborhood, but they are catching on with ISPs in other nations.

Google Fiber plus ubiquitous, free WiFi -- an offer your mayor cannot refuse

Google Fiber started in Kansas City. Based on that experience, they expanded to nearby Olathe, Kansas and hi-tech cities Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah will be next.

There has been a lot of speculation about Google's intention. Is Google Fiber just a proof of concept designed to spur the incumbent ISPs on? Were they picking hi-tech cities hoping to see some futuristic application development? Or, were they planning to become a nationwide ISP?

We got a hint when Eric Schmidt said Google Fiber was a "real business" and we read estimates of the cost of the Kansas City network and of a nationwide build-out.

Jason Calacanis has no doubt about Google's intention. His latest blog post is entitled "Google's Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers."

You should read it for yourself, but I want to focus on one claim he makes:

More importantly, every Google Fiber home will have a public wifi component. In order to get Google Fiber, you’re going to have to agree to put a router in that lets anyone use a portion of your bandwidth.

That’s not announced, but it’s gonna happen.

His contention is bolstered by the fact that Google is an investor in Fon. I wrote about Fon a few years ago in a post about people owning their own Internet infrastructure and providing decentralized backhaul for Wifi. Fon gave users free, open WiFi routers, but there were two problems.

For Fon to succeed, the open modems had to be ubiquitous. I was an original "Fonista," but there were only a few others in my part of Los Angeles. The second problem was backhaul speed. I had a slow DSL connection at the time. If a lot of neighbors and passersby had connected to my Fon router, it would have impacted my connectivity.

Those problems disappear if Fon is tied to Google Fiber. Google Fiber is such a good deal that it would become ubiquitous and, if you have gigabit service, you won't notice the load imposed by WiFi users.

Google needs cooperation with cities if Google Fiber is to succeed. One "carrot" they have been offering is free connectivity for community sites like libraries and hospitals. What if they sweeten the pot with ubiquitous WiFi? That is an offer the mayor cannot refuse.

Google has another asset. Recall that the decision to start in Kansas City was based on a proposal from the city. I don't know how many proposals Google received or what the cities offered, but Topeka joked about changing the city name to Google and Kansas City offered significant subsidies. I bet Google got some sweet offers.  I know they got a sweet sales-lead list.

If Jason Calacanis is right, and I do hope he is, this is the beginning of the end of business as usual for wired and wireless ISPs (aka cell phone companies).

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Update 4/26/2013

Time Warner Cable says they will offer free Wi-Fi in Austin (http://bit.ly/Y1vSUX).  It seems they got Google's message.  That being said -- I wonder whether they will be able to deliver.  What will be their backhaul strategy?

Own your connection infrastructure, use netBlazr

A while back I wrote an article and blog post stating:

The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is “who will own it?”

The article discusses several alternatives to ownership by the current telephone and cable companies: local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners.

I know of two trials in which home owners purchase their own links to a backhaul point -- similar to what we now do with our sewer and gas lines, and one wireless access company called Fon.

Fon claims 1,726,336 "members." Members purchase an 802.11n base station that is augmented with several application-layer programs for $99 or €79 and share bandwidth with other members. There are eight Fon installations in my zip code, but only two have been active during the last hour. After several years, Fon deployment is not dense enough to provide a viable alternative to the cable and telephone ISPs in my area, and I don't expect it ever will be.

But, technology and business models improve, and a new company, netBlazr, hopes to sell small business owners equipment for forming a network. The $299 equipment package contains three 802.11n radios and a fast router. Fiber backhaul is supplied by netBlazr. The basic service is free, but they also offer a premium service and dedicated circuit plans with guaranteed speed for small businesses.

NetBlazr's technology and business model are different than Fon's. The extra radios and faster router should improve performance in densely populated areas -- the extra routers let netBlazr change the network architecture on the fly if something goes wrong. The network architecture and backhaul provisioning lead them to deploy in highly local areas. They pick a backhaul point then sign up customers they can reach from that location. They started in a small area within Boston, and will expand from there as demand and density allow. If things go well, they will expand to service office buildings in other cities.

Will netBlazr catch on and scale up to provide a viable alternative to the incumbents? It may be a long shot, but companies like Google or Craig's List seemed like long shots at one point. You never know -- improving technology is on their side and their competitors are not used to competition.

Appended link:

Here are the slides from netBlazr founder Brough Turner giving a talk on the advantages of WiFi over Wimax and LTE and introducing netBlazr.

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Update 6/12/2015

Fon announced today that they have over 15 million people sharing Internet access over their personally owned open hotspots. Since WiFi range is limited, the value of a Fon membership increases with dense coverage, and as shown here, most of the "Fonistas" are in Western Europe.

In addition to signing up individual users, Fon is making deals with Internet service providers. In the US, cable companies are rolling out their own versions of shared access as is Google Fiber.