Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

First off, my apologies for the long silence here. It's been death march time for Pikesoft's biggest client which means lots of 10- to 11-hour days plus Saturdays as we start a rolling beta cycle that will end in a release to literally tens of thousands consultants. The first beta is to a much smaller group, but politically it's hugely important and it's been hard for me to think about anything else, much less blog about it. Finally, the CDs are being burned and I'm looking around to see what I've missed during the last two weeks (aside from sleep and days off).

Lots. But let's start with this little item. My good friend Jeff Duntemann (maybe best known for his classic primer on assembly language and a best-selling book on Wi-Fi) stumbled across a telling development in wide-area broadband wireless that's taking place in the small city of Pueblo, Colorado, just 45 minutes south of us. There, in a booth at the Colorado State Fair was the CEO of Airinet, a local ISP that is rolling out a Wi-Fi mesh network big enough to cover pretty much the entire city of Pueblo, with a population of a little over 100,000. These guys have come up with a tiny, super-cheap Wireless-B mesh node and a router system that they claim is efficient enough to deliver 1.5MB download and 1MB upload to clients that are as many as 8 hops (!) from a backhaul point. No towers for neighbors to complain about: they negotiate with homeowners to stick the unobtrusive repeaters under their eaves. No hardware to install to get service: it's 802.11b that any PC, PDA or Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phone can connect to indoors or out. No long term contract: unlimited access is a flat $25 month to month. Also never an insecure connection: the channel is encrypted with a 2,048-bit key. Best of all, no walled garden! Just a nice big pipe to the Internet anywhere you go in the city.

Mesh networks aren't terribly new. As Jeff points out, they have been used to unwire college campuses and for the odd municipal wireless project--mostly non-commercial stuff. Google is using a mesh architecture to deliver Wi-Fi throughout its hometown of Mountain View. But these are not Google engineers and this is not Silicon Valley. This is a mom-and-pop ISP in a small, blue-collar city with a median household income of about $30,000. If Airinet can make money today with a mesh Wi-Fi cloud over a city like Pueblo it raises some interesting questions:

• WiMax, the technology that was supposed to make this kind of thing possible is still by most accounts some years away for most of the US, so if mesh networks are low cost and ready for prime-time, will they steal the WiMax thunder?
• If a little company like Airinet can do this are we headed for another era of garage-ISPs, this time hawking ubiquitous wireless connectivity?
• If small commercial wireless meshes can make money with unlimited broadband at $25/mo, how long will the cellular wireless carriers be able to sell slower connections to walled gardens at two or three times the price?

Like a lot of mobile developers I'm fed up with the carriers. It's a bad business model when you need to sell through a channel instead of direct to the customer, especially when the channel has the controlling mentality that the network operators have today. If they get their way the era when users can buy shareware off your web site and install it on their phone will soon come to an end. Native apps will have to be approved and digitally signed by the carriers themselves, will only be available from within their walled garden portals, and will return little of the purchase price to the developer. If they succeed, mobile innovation will lag far behind the Internet speed of Web 2.0 and mobile developers will move on to greener pastures. But if small companies like Airinet can do an end-run around the wireless oligopoly things could play out quite differently. The carriers aren't going away--mesh networks won't offer nationwide roaming any time soon and the VoIP story is unclear. But for local wireless data the carriers won't be the only game in town and this could shift the competitive landscape in a direction that opens some nice opportunities for mobilists like us.