Harlem’s first Starbucks, heralded as a sign of urban renewal when it opened in 1999, sits at the intersection of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, just down the street from the historic Apollo Theater.  One recent weekday morning, customers of every imaginable race and socioeconomic stratum pour through the coffee chain’s doors, where a massive portrait of its most famous investor, basketball great Magic Johnson, graces one of its walls.

I grab a seat near the window and try to get on a wireless network—of the three I can see, only one is open. Seconds later I’m checking my e-mail.

It’s a lucky break—for all the promises of universal Internet, finding an open network in Manhattan is about as easy as catching a cab during rush hour. Michael Lewis, chief of the budding nonprofit Wireless Harlem, plans to change that.

“Let’s take a walk,” he says, when he finally arrives. We head north, past a string of laundromats, dollar shops and bodegas. Ten blocks later we grab a bench in the shade of the first apartment complex to be hooked up by Wireless Harlem.

“The median income in Harlem is $35,000 a year,” he says, pulling out a sleek new laptop—well below Manhattan’s $47,000-a-year median income recorded in the 2000 census. “At the end of the day when people make a decision about what they’re going to spend money on, it’s not going to be Internet access.”

Enter Meraki. Meraki Networks, Inc., is a three-year-old company headed by Sanjit Biswas, a polite and bespectacled Massachusetts Institute of Technology student-cum-CEO on permanent hiatus from the pursuit of a doctoral degree in computer science. No one at the company ever mentions this to me—there is such a thing as being too earnest—but I later discover that meraki is a Greek word that means putting a piece of yourself into something you create; in other words, doing it with love.

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Full story at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=38462CAE-E7F2-99DF-321E78970AEB35C0&ref=rss

Sprint Nextel is trying to reverse a string of recent disappointments.

Having lost ground to its rivals over the past year and struggled with problems with its old Nextel network, the Reston wireless company is hoping to find its footing by building a high-speed network using an untested technology called WiMax.

Sprint’s $3 billion investment has gained support of some technology companies and analysts. On one hand, it has drawn skepticism from Wall Street analysts, some of whom worry there is not enough consumer demand for the nascent technology. But it has the potential to surpass the speed of its competitors’ networks and, if successful, Sprint says the network will let customers wirelessly surf the Web at more than twice the speed of current cellular networks.

“Sprint looks like it’s in the position where it needs to do this to survive,” said Kirsten West, principal analyst with West Technology Research Solutions, a market-research firm in Mountain View, Calif. “Without it, they see themselves as being far less competitive.”

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/07/AR2007080701927_pf.html

(Lead for this story from Dewayne Hendricks posting to the Dewayne-net mailing list.)

Wireless access in general, and Wi-Fi technology in particular, has been very attractive to municipalities wanting to improve broadband communications for multiple reasons. One of the most obvious is the fact that laptops and PCs now come routinely equipped with Wi-Fi access, and the access network equipment is also widely available and reasonably priced.

But as more cities discover Wi-Fi’s limitations, they are also looking at other wireless options, namely WiMAX, the more robust wireless technology that is just now coming to market. Grand Rapids, Mich., is one of the first cities to move in this direction, partnering with Clearwire, which holds wireless spectrum in various places around the country and has been rolling out broadband wireless using pre-WiMAX technology.

Karl Edwards, president of Excelsio Communications, was a consultant to Grand Rapids on the project, and says the choice is based on looking carefully at the business case and at what the city actually wanted from its network. This is a particularly crucial decision for smaller cities or less densely populated areas, where the cost of putting in a Wi-Fi infrastructure is higher.

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
http://telephonyonline.com/wimax/technology/wimax_grand_rapids_081007

(Lead for this story from Google Alerts.)

Internet provider EarthLink and the city of Corpus Christi, Texas dedicated a 55-square-mile municipal Wi-Fi network this week, thanks in part to a dog.

“It started as a way to protect water meter readers,” recalled EarthLink’s Donald Berryman in an interview Friday. “It started as a network to meet a city need after a meter reader was attacked by a dog.”

The city began rolling out a 20-square-mile pilot project in 2004 and gradually began adding to the deployment. Berryman, who is president of EarthLink Municipal Networks, noted that several hundred Corpus Christi citizens picked up the Wi-Fi signal and began piggybacking on the network free of charge.

Currently, the city’s residents can use the system with upload and download speeds up to 1 Mbps for a $6.95-a-month promotional rate for six months and $19.95-a-month after that. A 3 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload is also available at $9.95 for the first six months and $21.95-a-month after that. Berryman noted that EarthLink expanded the network somewhat after it purchased it from the city this spring for $5.5 million and after the firm committed to spend an additional $900,000 in upgrades.

“This (network) is a true public-private partnership,” said Berryman. “You have to realize that each side has to commit to make it work.”

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201400236&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

(Lead for this story from DSLreports.com RSS feed.)

The cellular giant is planning to deploy limited WiMax services in the 2.3 GHz band that could be used as a fixed-wireless alternative to DSL or cable offerings, the source says. AT&T is said to have its suppliers for the service lined up now.

Spokespeople for the operator aren’t commenting on any potential WiMax deployments. “We would never comment on what we might or might not be doing,” one representative for AT&T says.

But this wouldn’t be a first. AT&T already has a limited deployment of the technology in Alaska. That initial rollout suggests that AT&T might use the technology to provide better broadband coverage in areas where it has less wireline infrastructure. (See How Close Is AT&T to WiMax?)

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=133853&f_src=unstrung_gnews

(Lead for this story from BroadBandReports.com RSS Feed.)

The networking giant could buy within a matter of weeks, according to one source. “It’s in legals now,” the source says.

Both sources agree that Cisco has narrowed it down to a shortlist of potential targets. The names in the frame are said to be Alvarion Ltd. (Nasdaq: ALVR – message board), Aperto Networks Inc. , Navini Networks Inc. , and Redline Communications Inc.

Alvarion and Redline appear to be the favorites on list. Cisco has already had some involvement with Redline in deploying a WiMax network in Paraguay. (See Redline Wins in Paraguay.)

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=134954

(Lead for this story from FierceBroadbandWireless via email.)

Navini is long-time broadband wireless company that several years ago shifted development from its proprietary CDMA-based nomadic platform to today’s Mobile WiMAX platform. Navini is also one of the few companies—the only major one being Alcatel-Lucent–to have built its platform on adaptive beamforming technology—something Think Equity feels makes it very attractive to Cisco. While most of the major vendors focus on multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna configurations, Navini has plowed its development into creating a beamformed MIMO architecture that steers paired signals to a CPE or device on the network. The intended result is greater capacity on the cell edge, something MIMO in its typical configurations can’t claim.

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
telephonyonline.com/home/news/cisco_navini_wimax_100107/

(Lead for this story from a tip from a colleague.)

One relatively short article cannot address every aspect of these issues, but it can at least highlight the crucial fundamentals.

One point that must be stressed is that your network’s hard design specifications will dictate the revenue streams and services your network will achieve. If you build a network that has relatively low throughput and isn’t 100 percent reliable, you’ll see a direct correlation in the adoption rate, usefulness and return on investment.

Regardless of legal structure – public ownership, public-private partnership, private ownership, nonprofit or any other variations – there are two major financial categories that must be scrutinized. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll define these categories as Government Cost Redirection and Revenue-Generating Services/Applications.

(end excerpt)

Full story at:
www.govtech.com/dc/articles/140765

(Lead for this story from Dewayne Hendricks posting to the Dewayne-net mailing list.)