Nice to have an interesting contrarian position. Craig Mattias looks at the current bad news on muniwireless — read Earthlink — and takes the long view. WiFi will come because there is no other alternative. WiFi will come to complement the cellular network because WiFi is just better at delivering local wireless broadband, and is a global standard.
What could well happen, especially in an urban environment, is that public WiFi will become the victim of WiFi’s over all success. At Union Square, NYC for instance, where we have one of our parkwifi locations, WiFi Salon has detected 215 other nearby networks. They interfere with our coverage, and affect our QoS, and of course interfere with each other. This is open spectrum, so that’s the way it goes.
Advances in technology will increase performance/QoS, but there are real limitations when it comes to RF interference.
