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11/10/2005: "Intel + RF still equals zero"
An ex co-worker of mine recently emailed:
Jim:
What is your take on the state of WiMax? What is it being used for and will it ever get any traction beyond backhaul? WiMax mobile? Anybody building chips?
I wrote back:
Intel has done a great job marketing/obfuscating between WiMax working at low transmitter power in unlicensed bands, where it can be no better than a mildly improved version of Wi-Fi, and working at high transmitter power in licensed bands. Can WiMax transmit much further than Wi-Fi in the cases where Craig McCaw has spent billions on licensed frequencies to broadcast at ten times the power? Certainly.
That apples-to-helium comparison is becoming more painfully obvious, and Intel's failure to protect the future of licensed Wi-Max (since Wi-Max has no future in unlicensed spectrum) from a vicious patent assult by Qualcomm will only accelerate the demise of WiMax, and quite possibly Intel.
Most importantly, free wireless hotzones are already being seen as a loss leader, even by Google. As Google leverages free Wi-Fi to push (at least) its local advertising business to critical mass, how likely are they to spend their time and money persuing licensed carriers, the FCC, and all the other baggage surrounding WiMax? Google owns fiber, they have no need for Intel's wonky broadband.
My prediction: WiMax will join HomeRF
If you want to play at something *huge*, I have an idea for combining metro fiber networks with GigE bandwidth with cheap Free Space Optics devices. The idea is simple: fiber down the fence line (or inside an MDU) so everyone is connected at GigE speeds. Since the LECs won't let 'us' string fiber on their poles, and the munis want to be paid for same, we avoid the poles and cross the street with FSO.
Now we have a switched, VLAN-capable GigE network (architected entirely on Ethernet standards) connecting 100s to 1000s of households.
Turns out we don't want the network (broadcast domain) diameter to be > 7 for a variety of technical reasons, mostly having to do with time to convergence of the spanning tree protocol. 7 'hops' is 8 houses, or 8 blocks of condo/apartments. 8 office buildings.
Eight is number almost anyone can wrap their head around. Eight is enough. The Chinese think 8 is a (very) lucky number. Eight is "ba" in Mandrin, and "ba" also means "sudden fortune, prosperity". Confucianism has eight emblems, as does Buddhism. There are eight sides to the "ba-gua" (triagam) of the I Ching; eight "pillars of heaven", and so forth.
Next we need some bandwidth. Its not much fun to have this super-fast network with a soda straw connection outside of it.
Turns out we already have it. By leveraging the (very fast) network connecting all these homes, as well as the cable/dsl modem in many, if not each home, we can (in software) construct a device that allows us to leverage the total available broadband in the sum of all those cable/dsl modems.
People join the network so they can share files (TV? MP3s? Porn?) with their neighbors, but as an advantage, they also turn out to get much faster IP services, and possibly even some redundancy.
Remember as well that we can inter-connect these networks with FSO, so whole neighborhoods, indeed whole districts can be "wired" together with GigE speeds. Quite frankly, the applications don't exist today for much more than 10Mbps - 100Mbps anyway.
From there its straight-forward to invite Google and other metro fiber plays into the game, so the networks get some real bandwidth. Think 100Mbps for $20/mo, full-duplex to your home, with a chunk of (IPv6) address space (IPv6 already works on linux, freebsd, Windows 2K & XP and MacOS X.n.) You can host your own servers, your own PBX. There is an entire ecosystem ready to be built around real bandwidth into people's homes and standards-based IP/Ethernet networking. Google (or another metro fiber play) could inter-connect the districts (and eventually neighborhoods) with 10Gigabit fiber (Ethernet, again!) connections. Now you're sharing a Gigabit with seven of your neighbors.
Its built from the ground up.
Its entirely doable. We could transform the planet in < 5 years.
It takes some technology development, but nothing that is harder than "Sandhawk", which, I remind you, worked as promised, and cost as promised. Improving the Ronja (above) to GigE speeds at 100m is probably an early step.
Another thing: we can use an analog of the distributed CCA technique we developed for Sandhawk to build a distributed "WiFi switch" architecture that *preserves* capacity *and* security over a wide area. Yes, we can leverage 802.11n (MIMO) as well. We could, quite literally, make an entire city appear as though its was covered by the AP in your home and business. You could walk around and would not be able to tell that you've "roamed". Packets would hit your home gateway and be invited 'inside', so all of your home (or work) network(s) would appear to be local, even though you're miles away.
Does that blow your mind?
I've been considering writing up the "howto" for all of this and trying to get a meeting at Google. I have no desire to try to get it funded by myself. Its just too much effort, and I'm not very VC-friendly after getting handed Stalter as my reward for successfully swimming upstream in the HP-invested waters at Vivato for all that time. I did my part, and more at Vivato. As a company, we did may things wrong, and I did many things wrong, but we had a chance to deliver on most of the outrageous claims (sorry, I can't fix multi-channel until we can fix the client devices) that the HP-nauts wholesaled for eventual resale to the investors and customers.
For my efforts, I got anally raped at the hands of a 10mW intellect named "Don". Fuck the VCs.
Are you ready to get the band back together or was your query due to some WiMax startup looking at you for executive talent?
Jim
