Chapter 21: Let’s do it for the Children

I get a lot of calls from people interested in starting a WISP. Since I look at each deployment as a challenge both technically and financially, it’s very interesting to me to hear the scenarios and the expectations. On the other hand, I’m also involved in several industry blogs centered on different products, and I have had the opportunity to listen to many experts with years of experience describe their methodology and philosophy behind their designs. What’s most fascinating is that the modern WISP operator has developed into the medical equivalent of the general practitioner or the proverbial jack-of-all-trades which has resulted in many successful deployments. Keep in mind that most profitable WISPS are built around PTMP design instead of a municipal mesh model. I’m hoping Guerilla WiFi can change the model.

One thing I learned a long time ago is that being vendor agnostic is a lot cheaper than blind loyalty. Before you start a WISP, first look at all the products that are on the market that are appropriate. Listen to what others say, especially those that have proven financially successful models. However, keep in mind that many people will blindly follow manufacturers like lemmings over a cliff, or worse, suggest that you go with them if they are already invested in a particular vendor. Make sure you talk to operators that are using different types of products.

During the market transition of Microsoft Word for Windows from WordPerfect for DOS, I saw staff ready to quit their jobs if they were forced to change to Microsoft Word because of their comfort level with Word Perfect. During one particularly testy Word Perfect to Word upgrade at a law office, a para-legal threatened me with an optional surgery procedure involving her keyboard that not only was I sure she wasn’t medically licensed to perform, I wasn’t even convinced it was anatomically possible. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t stand still in the high-tech industry and complacency means obsolescence as demonstrated by IBM, Sun, Lotus, and even Microsoft (Balmer needs to get a better cologne because whatever he is wearing is making his senior staff disappear faster than Microsoft’s consumer base). Try highlighting Lotus administration in your resume and see how many job offers you get. In the wireless industry, there are established players such as Motorola and Dragon that are getting hurt by new players such as Ubiquiti, Tranzeo, Microtik, and SAF who are providing products with significantly lower prices. That should never be the only criteria for selecting a product since every product has some feature that may be critical for a design as we shall see when I get to the backhaul section.

The model for Guerilla WiFi wasn’t based on the idea that WISPs can only compete in the remote areas. It was designed with the idea that profits should be generated in 12 months or less, regardless of location, and that the complete ROI of a new design shouldn’t be much more than 2 years. This should make it a no-brainer business model for investors. But wait, there’s more. Buy it today and you get the following bonus, it’s cheap to maintain so investors or governments shouldn’t go broke keeping it running, and better yet, it’s good for the children. This model also comes from the idea that it will take products from multiple vendors to make work.

Recently, I was approached by an economic group looking to improve coverage in their county. The basic statistics were that the county had 25,000 households with 10% of the households having no high-speed internet or only cellular and satellite options. 47% of the 25,000 households had high-speed internet installed between cable and DSL, and were paying about $36 per month although I don’t believe that included taxes. Average annual income level in the county is about $43,000. The total county area is a little less than 500 square miles.

I ran some calculations and using the PTMP Guerilla WiFi model and came up with the following numbers using a bandwidth to user ratio of 12-1 and a target of 5Mbps per customer average. Profitability should be achievable in less than 12 months and ROI in 30 months with a continuous linear growth factor through that period. In 36 months, the model predicts a gross profit percentage of 50% or more by month 36. Those numbers alone made it a no-brainer in terms of a simple investment opportunity.

However, the next part ticked me off and should embarrass the telcom industry, the political establishment, and be a wake-up call for our country. Data provided by the economic council showed this disturbing fact, this county has a middle school where only 12% of the students have the option of high-speed internet at home. Now it just became personal.

This is truly an embarrassment for a nation that used to be a leader in innovation, manufacturing, and education. Other schools had higher percentages but the reality is that until all students in this country can access affordable, high-speed internet at least for educational purposes, then we need to do better as a nation. If I was King for a day, I would host a conference, not with a bunch of politicians or leaders of nationwide cellular companies, but with the guys who have built and operate profitable WISP infrastructures all over North America. The knowledge and talent built up by guys who can climb a tower, design a network, map an RF plan, and run multi-million dollar businesses is what this problem needs.

Here’s an idea, take a cue from the Sopranos and carve up the country into areas of responsibility for the WISPS. Find the areas that wired services and monopolistic incumbents aren’t providing competitive options, define a fixed price for each client installation with guaranteed bandwidth requirements, get rid of all the union rules and bureaucratic paperwork that government jobs require (which is a complete waste of time and lowers wages due to overhead) and turn these guys loose. I guarantee that installations would be starting in weeks and the job would be completed within a year. Want a stimulus program idea, this is it. When it’s all over and the politicians want to know how it was done, just say “fuggetaboutit, you don’t want to know. Enjoy your $10 Internet and don’t ask any questions”.

Of course I’m joking, but there is simply no reason for 88% of students in a school not to have access to high-speed Internet anywhere in the United States, politically or economically. Being the capitalist that I am however, I realized that this situation wasn’t going to be solved with politicians directing government funding as evidenced by the last round of government grants. We wasted 7 billion dollars in the last couple years and it didn’t make a dent in the bandwidth needs in our country. We spent millions of dollars of that money just trying to figure out where the holes were.

There needed to be a business case which supported providing internet to these students at a cost which makes it attractive to investors ,(not that the federal government would have any interest in that unless it involved federal employees or union workers to run it, no self-interest there), but yet provide 100% coverage for students. After a little more thought on the problem, three more Diet Cokes, and several of my favorite snacks, the OREO cookie (a shameless plug but maybe Coke and Nabisco will send me a 24-pack of the bubbly and a bag of double-stuffed cookies to power my idea processor), I came up with a methodology I have named, “Education Everywhere”. With slight modifications, the Guerilla WiFi model can easily accomodate “Education Everywhere” capabilities to these students for less than $10 per month and still produce a profit for investors. At that price, there is no longer an excuse not to have high-speed bandwidth for almost every student in the country.

With a little cooperation from the schools, Education Everywhere could also tighten up the bond between parents and education as well as expand distance learning options. The $7 billion dollars worth of grants that the government gave out could have installed 8,500,000 residential locations and subsidized them for 3 years. On the other hand, it could have provided “Education Everywhere” bandwidth to students for the next 6 years or more. We could have covered 40-60% of the 100 million users the federal government claims don’t have high-speed internet. If a President ever comes out in a State of the Union speech leading with those types of numbers, I will sit and listen to the rest of the speech without saying a word. Okay, maybe not since political speeches are boring and have more fantasy in them than the Sci-Fi channel, but you don’t win the future if you can’t produce a quality education with the right high-tech tools. I just want to do it without the country going into debt further.

As much as I’m excited about the “Education Everywhere” program, I’m going to hold back on writing more about it until we start deploying it in a few months. Instead, let’s get back to the details of how to deploy a system to cover 500 square miles and makes a profit. There are three basic parts to the infrastructure:

1. Data Center Infrastructure
2. Backhaul
3. Last-Mile

Starting with step 1, I have discovered so far that data centers in other parts of the country are apparently more proud of their bandwidth than we are in the Southwest. Prices in Phoenix range from $1-$2 per 1Mbps depending on the pipe size. My first quote for one particular data center started at $11-$14 per 1Mbps. It took me 14 pages of reading to find those numbers behind a very professional looking proposal format. I would rather the company save the money used to develop this great looking proposal and get the pricing down to $3 per Mbps or less. I’m buying bandwidth, not proposal writing templates. I know of WISPs that are paying $80 per Mbps in Canada due to their monopolistic structure and who are probably wishing they could get these prices but hey, that’s what capitalism is all about. $11-$14 isn’t going to fly with this model so I will be back on the phone tomorrow wondering why it’s taking data centers a week to respond to my contact us forms. Fortunately there are several more options and some of the verbal quotes I am receiving now (backed up by what I’m sure are more very lengthy professional looking proposals) are getting down into the $6 per Mbps region.

Based on our 12-1 ratio, 5Mbps minimum, and the expectation that we are going to have 2400 clients deployed in the first year, our required bandwidth at the data center is about 1Gbps. What a coincidence that number happens to coincide with the bandwidth numbers of 80GHz and licensed radio systems. Here is our first decision point based on terrain. If our backhaul distance is 20 miles, we have to decide if we want three to four 80Ghz hops (I’m looking at Bridgewave for this model). However, redundancy for this model gets expensive with this many hops. The second option if the terrain permits it, would be to shoot the entire distance with a licensed frequency radio from Dragonwave or Bridgewave. I haven’t looked at the path calculations or the terrain maps yet but I’m guessing Dragonwave can do a 20 mile shot at 1Gbps at lower frequencies. Not sure what I can do at 18GHz yet but I’m running the numbers now. If not, I know they can do 2 hops for certain. Dragonwave can also go out to 2Gbps or more with compression which makes it a frontrunner in this project if I choose this model. I’ll have the backhaul decision made before the next article, along with a redundancy plan.

Although the primary goal of this project is based on good old capitalistic motives, if there is a chance of doing the right thing simultaneously, so much the better. Internet isn’t a taxpayer right any more than happiness or health care, but as Americans, we need to figure out how to make this happen for the kids. What’s funny is that budget cuts across the country aren’t the worst thing that can happen since that means inefficient government programs will simply not have the funding. Simultaneously, investors sitting on the sidelines might start looking hard at investing into a market that not only has a huge profit potential, but the opportunity to move the country forward again in the area of technology. I’m very grateful to the economic council that opened my eyes to the situation in their area of the country and applaud their efforts in helping me make this happen. Hopefully many of you in the Wireless Industry that have insight into the same issues facing students in your areas will now look at ways to break down the Digital Divide wall also with other innovative ideas that we can share with the industry.

Chapter 19 – Catch a Wave-Guide and You are Sitting on Top of the World

The Beach Boys are going to hate me for this but I’ve been waiting for years to use that line. I also wanted to title it, “Look Ma, no mesh” but I should have used that one several articles ago. It’s not that I have anything against mesh as there is an application for almost every technology. At this point in the industry and the economy, however, it’s time to get past a word very few non-technical people understand and the excessive associated cost of it. Anyway, this article is about wave-guide antennas so let’s get back to that.

Vivato was a wave-guide based antenna. I have had Securawave wave-guide antennas installed for about 7 years. I became a believer when I connected a car at 2 miles and my laptop inside a Jack-in-the-Box at 1 mile. The horizontal polarity was a huge advantage since most wireless APs were vertical polarity. Securawave is no longer in business so I’m hoarding the last few units I have to support units I have in the field. Not that solid aluminum blocks have a tendency to fail as I suspect they will last longer than the buildings they are mounted to (they just don’t make them like this anymore), but in case of physical damage. I don’t need dual-polarity and 2x2 MIMO yet in these areas because Qwest hasn’t figured out how to get more then 3Mbps over the so-called HD Internet services and I’m not ready to mortgage my house for their other service offerings. Of course it’s hard to dial the phone when your eyes are tearing up from laughter when they advertise their new 40Mbps service. 18 months ago they couldn’t even keep a 640Kbps DSL line running properly in the middle of Phoenix less than 1 mile from Sky Harbor Airport.

Historically, wave guide antennas were expensive to make which is probably why it didn’t have more popularity. Ubiquiti seems to be bringing it back with its new omni-directional dual-polarity antennas. We know that dual-polarity has better penetrating and range capability than single polarity. So the idea of extending that into an omni-directional antenna seems like a great idea. Since there isn’t any other 2x2 MIMO omni-directional dual-polarity antennas that I know about, this is really cool from a technical, design, and financial standpoint. It’s also how we are going to keep Guerilla WiFi cost-effective and make it better.

The new Ubiquiti omni-directional antenna isn’t a true wave-guide antenna. Since it needs both polarities, half the antenna is basically two 180 degree vertical polarity sector antennas back to back with dual 180 degree wave guide antennas. Since it’s not out yet, I haven’t tested the unit but the pre-spec guess is it’s around 12-13dbi. That means the effective LOS range with dual polarity is going to be about 30% farther than an omni with 15dBi of gain for a couple of reasons. However, real world performance is going to be significantly better since dual-polarity will definitely penetrate vegetation better, reduce noise off-polarity, and reduce fading. If the client is using a dual-polarity indoor radio, then not only will range be better, noise will be significantly reduced even further. I smell a huge performance improvement in the air for Guerilla WiFi.

Let’s go back to Chapter 1 of Tales where we designed a $10K per square mile system. In that design, we used a 15dBi omni-directional antenna with a single polarity omni-directional. This design was using a single stream 802.11 b/g/n design. With the new dual-polarity omni-directional antenna, we still use a single radio for our AP but we have doubled the throughput with a 2x2 MIMO stream. In addition, we have doubled the throughput of every hop and added an additional hop. Even at the 4rd hop we are still delivering up to 10Mbps. Keep in mind that at a 10-1 oversell rate, that means that you can sell twenty clients 5Mbps at the end of the chain. Although pricing hasn’t been released, I’m pretty sure this antenna with a Rocket M2 radio will still cost less than $300. Double the performance of the original Guerilla WiFi at no additional cost and it’s better than triple coupon day at my local grocery.

Think about that for a moment. If we only had one egress point for our network, our base network was limited to 3 hops with the same capacity at the end. This single antenna, which allows us to change from a single stream 802.11b/g/n radio to a 2x2 AP, doubles that throughput, thus extending our single AP model out even further and doubling bandwidth down the chain. Our egress point can also use multiple radios which can triple the throughput to 3 times that for $300-$600 more without even getting into out next topic, GPS Synchronization. So for less than $11K per square mile, the system now supports 180-300Mbps, depending on the clients. So if your town is 20 square mile and this whole system cost $250K to put in, then it’s a no-brainer simply for cameras, security, mobile access, and department efficiency. Of course, if it goes through federal funding, has government engineers add in the fact that it has to support mesh (pointless in this and most designs but adds significant costs), throws in ridiculous temperature requirements like -30C for Phoenix or 80 degrees centigrade when -75 degrees centigrade would work fine, and requires copious amounts of paperwork to tell 14 different government agencies that you are paying wages equal to union scale even though you pay your guys more than that, then it’s going to cost $1,000,000 (my English teachers just had heart attacks over that sentence). If you can sense my frustration with federal rules that require union contractor shops to do work that is clearly better suited to IT companies, then you are very astute. This is why projects involving the government cost so much and take so long.

If this is a for profit network, $250,000 to cover 20 square miles with this level of bandwidth is pretty impressive. It’s fairly easy and cheap to add 100Mbps backhaul to each square mile for a total of 2GBps for the entire system. Realistically, I would guess that you would get about 500Mbps before the price starts going up for full-duplex links. Keep in mind that we are back to the core idea of an inexpensive municipal deployment.

Using numbers from previous articles, let’s assume 800 potential clients per square mile. If we get 10% of that base at $30 per month, that’s $48,000 per month. With this type of system, only a very small percentage of clients are going to need truck rolls. Total revenue on this network is almost $600K per year. If users have to get client radios, then they start at $30 for 802.11n 1x1 Vertical Polarity CPE’s. For about $80, you can include a window mount and get 2x2 MIMO. In most environments, I would be surprised if truck rolls needed to be done on more than 10% of the clients. Even if you add in the cost of the client radios, this system should be cash flow positive at 800 clients and should pay for itself at 2400 clients within 12 months. This just covers residential and doesn’t even get into business revenue. The numbers are now speaking to me so it’s time to kick the venture capital market back into high gear.

Also consider this, the 16 AP per square mile strategy now covers a higher percentage of deployments, especially profit oriented ones. If you live in the middle of high-density city, then you would want more APs per square mile for density or you fall back on the super AP concept described in previous articles. Since WiFi is far more unpredictable that PTP RF modeling, there is nothing wrong with installing 16 AP’s and then site surveying to see if there are coverage gaps than hinder more revenue.

Cell phone companies don’t cover every square inch of every house on the planet. It’s not cost effective. They deploy with the best models they have and then decide if it’s profitable after field testing to fix poor signal areas. WiFi should be deployed the same way. Put up 16 AP’s, field test, check the areas with poor coverage, and then decide if it’s worth another $300 in equipment to cover that area. If an area has higher usage, add in a triple radio AP upgrade for a few hundred dollars more. If an area really just needs more signal gain, look at adding a beam-forming AP just for a specific direction. There are many options but all of them would be based on sound profitability principals. There is nothing wrong with walking away from 2 customers that might cost $3000 to add additional infrastructure to cover.

I have 2 “Peeves of week” I have to get off my chest. The second is 99.999% uptime. I was asked to design a system where I have to guarantee the CPE’s have 99.999% uptime. Since the wireless industry has new equipment out every few months, very little of what I would deploy today has enough history for me to put my reputation behind that request. I’m not talking about PTP full-duplex $10K and put links but $50-$400 CPE’s. First off, anything less than 802.11N is too old and too slow for this type of video application. Second, anything that’s 802.11N hasn’t been around long enough to know how it’s going to run 3 years from now. It’s kind of a catch-22 situation. That means using cameras with built-in recorders that are going to cost three times as much or more than using lower priced cameras with CPE’s. Unfortunately there is no product history out there than guarantees that. The reality is that all the radios I work with rarely, if ever, just simply go offline if installed correctly. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to down for planned firmware upgrades or other system changes. However, the 99.999% uptime request didn’t stipulate whether planned maintenance was included.

I’ve already mentioned my first pet peeve, municipal bids that ask for mesh when every AP connected has a directional antenna. To everyone who keeps adding this expensive request into these bids, it’s a waste of money taxpayers’ money and costs the city a lot more to support in the long run. When you add a directional antenna to an AP or CPE, it’s a PTP or PTMP design, regardless of what firmware is on there. There is no mesh because the radio can’t connect to anything it’s not pointed at. By adding the mesh requirement, you are either getting the most expensive product out there or White Box APs with custom open-source mesh firmware that is cheaper. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for mesh, but don’t eliminate other options like WDS. It’s not your money you are spending; it’s ours, the taxpayers. Let the industry and a wireless engineer decide what the best product for the design is. It shouldn’t be the salesperson that took you out to lunch last week and has shiny brochures. If mesh is appropriate and the best fit, let the companies bidding on the project put that down. If WDS will work just as well or a PTMP design is better, they will bid that. So can anyone guessed what crossed my desk again this week? I know I’m beating my head against the wall on this since arguing with government is like trying to tell a 3 year old that candy isn’t good for them.

So we have come full circle on Guerilla WiFi from $10K per square mile to $50K per square mile and now back to $10K per square mile with double the performance. If this doesn’t kick the industry back into high gear, I’m not sure what will. Next we will cover GPS sync and how that affects deployments strategies.

Chapter 18 - Demystifying Beam-Forming

Based on some of the emails I’m getting, the biggest complaint is not enough details and without them, it’s difficult to implement the idea. Fair enough, I’m definitely guilty of that. In my defense, please understand that I want to have a personal life. Not that I have one now, as most WISP’s can attest, but if I had to put down every single detail on every single project or idea, I would be writing from here to Kingdom come. Except for the 6 guys on the planet like me that think they ought to make a movie out of every article in EETimes (I think a lower noise figure on a 741 OP-Amp makes a compelling plot line), most of you would be cancelling your Ambien prescriptions. The reality is that the details only matter to technical people and those are called White Papers. I’ve written a couple but I can’t sit still long enough to finish dinner, let alone do a 20 page technical document. My wife says that if I had put as much time into my homework as I have these articles, I would have my Master Degree by now. Of course, if University of Phoenix gave me real life credit for standing in a man-lift hanging antennas 80 feet in the air, I could get my Doctorate without ever attending class.

Let’s get back to the really cool stuff like beam-forming. We covered 900MHz and both the positive and negative aspects. Let’s move on to the category of what’s old is now new again, beam-forming. Vivato pioneered the idea several years ago but the financial model, coupled with irresponsible pre-marketing, didn’t really work in the real world. However, they did get the FCC to change the rules which is going to be a very good thing moving forward. The difference is how the different implementations of beam-forming are implemented and the effect in the real world, technically and financially.

Long before Vivato, the Super Scanner antenna from Antenna specialist tried to get an antenna to function in both a directional and omni-directional mode with the turn of a knob. Some of the manufacturers such as Wavion and Netronics sort of copied this model by using a ring of vertical omni-directional antennas. They can get up to 12dBi of antenna gain off of 7-9dBi antennas. Currently these units are limited to 802.11b/g bands and vertical polarity.

The next kind of design was done by SkyPilot where they simply rotated connection to one of 8 integrated sector antennas at any one time. This gave them up to 44dBm of EIRP in the 4.9-6.0 GHz bands. Ruckus, Netgear (with Ruckus helping), Cisco, and others are now integrating the antennas on circuit boards but at a lower gain. There will be several antennas cut into the boards or some other internal antenna hardware to add vertical and/or dual-polarity to the board that provide directional coverage. These designs are achieving up to 10dBi in gain with the bigger advantage being the noise reduction from other directions. They use the model of picking the 2 best signal antennas to receive the signal simultaneously since doubling antenna capture area provides up to a 3dB increase.

Vivato is still the technical King here in this realm though, although they weren’t covering 360 degrees. Vivato achieved 24dBi of gain in a 100 degree pattern in 2.4GHz. The catch is they did it for $8,000-$15,000, which meant I could either buy a new van for my company or 2 APs. That sort of limited the market for the product to the point that they are no longer in business, which is also what happens when you don’t listen to your vendors trying to sell the equipment. However, that 24dBi of gain is a huge advantage for reaching underpowered smartphones. Since Ubiquiti has now announced that they are releasing a beam-forming product over the next 2-4 months, the question is, does that have value for a municipal design?

Getting back to today, Wavion’s newest product, the WBS-2400 is probably the closest to the Ubiquiti beam-forming radio. It’s also very similar to Altai A8-Ei product with multiple radios, sectored antennas, and one enclosure. Both products tighten up the beam and assign a single radio per antenna. Unfortunately, both these products are still b/g.

Going back to the formula that distance doubles for every 6dBi of gain, if a 2.4GHz beam-forming AP has 21dBi of gain, or what I’m guessing the new Ubiquiti units are going to be, that almost quadruples the range of most omni-directional AP’s. Throw in the fact that noise will be reduced by at least -20dB, and the s/n ratio goes berserk. The effective range increase, and this is only my best estimate in the worst scenarios, is probably a factor of 8-16 in open air environments. This means hitting a smartphone at 3000-4000 feet or more is possible.

Here is where it gets interesting though. Based on past experience, I’m guessing the Ubiquiti beam-forming AP will be less than $300. That is 10 times less than other beam-forming products, none of which support 802.11N 2x2 MIMO. Heck, it’s less than I paid for a baseball bat last season.

We were all trained to think in terms of APs needing to cover 360 degrees for municipal deployments. Every product out there is designed for that. The end result of this is when the density reaches a certain level, the self-interference is basically self-defeating. I’ve seen proposals that suggest 60 APs per square mile for example. Central management systems can dynamically adjust power output between APs to reduce the interference and can simultaneously adjust power output on a per packet basis to reduce the interference even further. However, all this costs which effectively drives the price up to $150,000 per square mile or more for this level of performance. However, what in the playbook says that every AP has to have omni-directional coverage?

Throughout this series, we’ve been driving towards a low-cost, high-capacity design that can be commercially deployed. The original idea was trying to develop an inexpensive Super AP. I’ve gone from $200 to $2000 and was working on an idea that would have driven the cost to a retail level of $4000. It supported 1Gbps per AP and 700+ simultaneous clients, but still it got away from my original idea which was to lower the bar on the per mile cost, which it didn’t accomplish. It basically comes down to the following, are you trying to compete with cable which can deliver up to 50Mbps or delivering Internet to people who have to suffer with dial-up, or worse, DSL delivered by Qwest in Arizona (okay, bad joke).

Beam-forming lets us start with a new playbook. The first thing you do in a playbook is define your assets (okay, I never played organized football so I’m making this part up.). Using the Ubiquiti beam-forming product (2.4GHz version), we know roughly that we will have about 21dBi of gain, 90 degree coverage zone, 16 degree beam pattern, GPS synchronization, and 2x2 dual-polarity 802.11N MIMO. Since we can now hit a phone at 2500 feet without much of a problem in open air, the design mentality changes. Even with 21dBm of gain, we still aren’t going to penetrate several buildings. However, we probably bought ourselves another house or two. By changing the angle of transmission, ala cell towers, and to be fair to Vivato’s deployment design in Spokane, tops of buildings aiming down, and all of a sudden we are hitting several houses down the street. Throw in 2x2 MIMO dual-polarity, and the connection distance goes way up.

Because of the price point, I’m guessing Ubiquiti’s product uses the same type of design as SkyPilot in terms of switching between multiple feed points on the antenna. The difference is that each feed generates a different angle of radiation versus being a completely separate physical antenna. Ruckus hits multiple feeds also with circuit board based antennas.

Although the tops of buildings aren’t ideal for sector antennas due to amount of AP’s that are going to get picked up, if you aim it towards the horizon, angle it down 60 degrees or more, you still get coverage down the street and pretty impressive building coverage. At that angle, you are reducing attenuation from outer wall penetration and even taking the route of shooting through the roof. This doesn’t work all that well in areas with trees, but if the buildings are made out of concrete, brick, or stucco, then this might be the best option. There are a lot of cities where the street lights are decorative and there is no way to install an AP down at ground level, so secondary options are a must. Beam-forming makes this design more useable by effectively reducing the beam pattern down way down.

This model might work in a different way also. Think in terms of 3 dimensions instead of 2. Larger buildings or apartments in downtown areas might be 10 floors or more. Placing these antennas on the side of one building several stories up and aiming into another building let’s you build a vertical WiFi Although attenuation has been a killer, 21dB of gain makes up for a lot of wall and window attenuation. In addition, dual polarity will improve penetration even further. If you pick up 30 customers in a building at $20 per month, 3-4 antennas pointing into the building get paid for in a couple of months. I would have also said it’s significantly cheaper than AP’s in the building until I saw another product that I’m testing (to be discussed later). However, when you add in the savings on pulling cable, it’s a no-brainer.

Irregular areas with streets curving all over the place are another option for this type of design. Intermixed homes and small business areas with mostly 1-2 story homes and 2-5 story buildings work well for this design. Outdoor coverage is universal with indoor coverage hitting around 80% or more with careful planning. Keep in mind I’m assuming everyone wants to give you free vertical assets to enhance the system.

Bringing us back to earth gives us most of the real-world deployments, street lights. This is where the GPS synchronization really kicks in and is now the direct comparison to Wavion or Ruckus. Placement of four of these radios on a pole to cover 360 degrees provides the absolute farthest range of any AP on the market. This is only possible with GPS synchronization to keep them from interfering with each other. It effectively provides twenty four 16 degree beams shooting out in 360 degree pattern. The cost of this super AP will be about $1500 which isn’t a lot less than Wavion or other beam-forming 360 degree APs. It does have significantly longer range through, by a factor of 9dBi and dual-polarity which is worth another 3dB in my field testing. With the IPad supporting 802.11n and the Beam-Forming antenna supporting dual-polarity, this would be a potent combination for off-loading some bandwidth.

If we duplicate this design with Altai or Ruckus, the cost is now over $10K per AP. There are other manufacturers such as Motorola that use sector antennas but then the antenna gain drops back to 12dBi or less and their beam patterns are 120 degrees. The best way to reduce noise is to decrease the beam pattern which it also doesn’t do. Effectively we get a 9dBi increase and 20+dB of noise reduction for a cumulative 29dBm improvement in s/n ratio. Regardless of what wireless philosophy you follow, that’s huge.

Here is one of my philosophies though, “If you spend too much, all you have lost is a little money. If you spend too little, you could lose everything.” Guerilla WiFi is based on the concept of being the most cost-effective way to deploy and what I feel is the only way to make municipal wireless a self-sustaining profitable model. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way in every situation. I’m describing equipment that isn’t even out on the market yet and isn’t field tested. Wavion, Ruckus, Altai, Bel-Air, Motorola, FireTide, Cisco, Enterasys, and a host of other vendors are proven products that have been deployed and tested. I do think these vendors are making it difficult to meet the financial needs of a profitable municipality model which is where Guerilla WiFi comes in, but the products are solid. This models works for me and others who are willing to spend the time to work through early firmware issues and fine-tune the models during deployment. It’s kind of like the difference between Linux and Windows. Since Ubiquiti uses a common firmware platform across all of their outdoor products and has made great strides towards stability and features, I expect the new products to use the same firmware base which means , the firmware. However, there is still a long way to go towards a turn-key municipal deployment without a lot of engineering intervention. Based on the cost/performance ratio, I believe it’s worth it. But realistically I spend a lot of time testing and adjusting. Most customers are going to expect a more turn-key solution. However, if it’s your money, then this solution provides the best chance of financial success.

With this AP design, $1500 per AP is getting pretty pricey. However, it will also combine with our next article, the 360 degree dual-polarity 2x2 MIMO AP for under what I’m guessing is going to be $300. I’ll try not to wait 3 weeks to make this happen.

One other note that I want to mention is that Mike Ford is no longer at Ubiquiti. Mike was a central figure that seemed to have his hands in everything from testing to customer support. Over the last 3 years, he has become a friend that always went the extra mile to make sure I had the resources I needed for my clients. He was also instrumental in some of my decisions on my deployments. Although I don’t know his future plans, I am very sorry to see him go.

Chapter 15 - Thinking is cheaper than doing

I said we would figure out how to compete with cable and it’s time to put up or shut up. I’m not writing the entire business plan here and I’m going to leave some key pieces out to protect some of what I’m working on, but the basic concept is here and it’s solid. We will put it all together later but let’s just think it through first and add some more tools.

Early on while developing this idea, I realized that while anybody could create a system that delivered bandwidth, the retail price of bandwidth was going to probably go down, making a Capex recovery more difficult. I have realized now that I looked at it the wrong way and that there would never be enough bandwidth, regardless of the cost. I also felt that there weren’t enough apps out there to drive the need for more bandwidth so that was the first part of the equation that had to be solved. This problem started fixing itself with the advent of smart phones, YouTube, video conferencing, VoIP, etc… and bandwidth needs started increasing very quickly. More recently I have to personally thank Google for their new search engine and Direct TV with the NFL package. Just keep em’ coming boys.

Small businesses need better options than T-1 circuits. They are slow and expensive. DSL circuits are slightly faster down and almost slower up. Of course, if they could keep them working or keep the performance at the purchased rate, that would be even better (can you tell I had another Saturday morning wasted calling Qwest tech support for a circuit bouncing like a superball) . Cable is also starting to expand again. However, in any area that only has one local loop provider, let’s just say you aren’t getting any coupons in the mail.

If you really want to see the opposite of capitalism in action in this area, just visit Mexico and try to start a wireless internet business. You have to hand your business plan over to Telmex, all the details and technologies, and hope they approve you opening up a company to compete with them. Yea, like that’s going to happen. It costs $1200-$2500 for a simple T-1 circuit down there. Imagine Cricket having to ask Verizon if they can open up a competing cell phone company. Mexico will always be playing catch up technically to the rest of the world until they allow open competition for small businesses. For those who want to tell me that Telmex is providing low-cost DSL service, try to make a VoIP International call over the service and amazingly, the quality is really bad. Wonder if that has anything to do with Telmex charging exhorbitant rates for international calling. If any country needed wireless options to compete with Telmex, Mexico does.

It’s also evident that the chokehold held by local loop provides wasn’t going to change without a huge investment in fiber or cable. I still believe that fiber is the best technical way to deliver massive bandwidth. It is by far the best long term solution based on what I see in the future for wireless, but it’s not the most cost-effective unless you happen to be digging up the street for some reason and laying new conduit. The power companies had the best chance to break that monopoly but the Bandwidth over Powerlines idea was simply a bad idea. They had a better solution on the table and still do, but I don’t see any of them playing that card. They could have easily delivered 30Mbps to the home for a lot less money than BoP but but I haven’t seen anyone deploy that idea, nor do I expect them to.

Investment in fiber is difficult to make for residential because of the long term ROI. That’s why most companies have abandoned it. The population density in the U.S along with the lack of new home construction and infrastructure mean that almost the only group willing to throw money at FTTH is the federal government since hey, it’s not their money and they need more votes. Whether it’s the most efficient use of our tax money is irrelevant. In the meantime, wireless costs have come way down while capacity has increased. Of course, cable companies haven’t been sitting on their hands and their capacity has increased simultaneously. DSL, well let’s just say that the DSL companies are still evaluating expanding into the Realty and Moving and Storage businesses. I really like the new marketing plan in Phoenix calling DSL “Heavy Duty or HD Internet. I almost crashed my car I when I saw that billboard I was laughing so hard. I was thinking HD stood for Howdy Doody Internet after several more crashes of my service again this week.

Being the wireless technical gurus that we all are, we just simply say throw up AP’s everywhere which is what municipal wireless and mesh systems tried to do. This would cover about half the calls I have gotten from people interested in these types of projects. One minute of explanation concerning getting access rights and insurance along with pesky little details like ROI, and the conversation ends. As I pointed out in the last article, as cheap as wireless is to deploy compared to fiber, it’s just as difficult to recoup the ROI because it’s difficult to deliver a triple-play solution which has the highest revenue. It’s also logistically difficult, expensive, and a very long term project to deploy hundreds of vertical assets around a city, assuming you can even get access to them. Nowadays interference, as pointed out in Chapter 13, is also a way of life.

If you have read all the articles, the blueprint is already there for alternative municipal deployments or my favorite phrase, Guerilla Wireless. The devil is in the details and implementation. We needed an inexpensive source of Internet which we found for as little as $1 per Mb. We need a backhaul infrastructure that can support up to 2Gbps or more. That’s off the shelf today with all the licensed and unlicensed equipment out there and throughput ranging up to 4Gbps or more. Our last mile equipment on the client side is less than $100. We also know that we can build systems capable of delivering last mile up to 30Mbps or more to residential or business systems with AP’s costing as little as $100.

Part of the formula in calculating ROI in an area depends on whether you are using PTMP, open WiFi, or a hybrid model to provide service. It’s also important to decide if you are going to compete on price alone or on service levels. Going head to head with comparative pricing has been the battle that wireless hasn’t been able to fight. We can fight that now. However, you are going to have to make sure that your system is rock solid. In addition, if you can get $40 dollars or more, regardless of the deliverable bandwidth, your numbers start to look better. With all the people who are dropping cable TV and going to Internet TV only, if you can deliver the bandwidth, you can compete and be profitable. Keep the TV thing in mind as you calculate other revenue streams also. Also keep in mind the billing structure for your local power company. These are hints to maximize your revenue per bandwidth.

Now you are probably thinking that I’ve left out an important piece such as vertical assets. Again, I point out that I gave the blueprint for how to install systems in many environments. What I haven’t covered is how to get local assets, get the support of the community behind you, and do it for little or no monthly costs. You aren’t getting around the Capex part but if you can get a lot of your vertical assets and contribute to the community on many levels, that’s a huge advantage. WiFi is a game of inches (thank you Vince Lombardi) that has to be played at that level. It also has to be played at the political level. However, put the right players in the game to handle these, coupled with a solid technical team and the numbers work. Your team has to be fast, ambitious, and willing to take risks.

Let’s add a few more tools into our toolbox first. The biggest tool is using single building supporting a 4 square mile area for less than $3000 in equipment. We know that large brick buildings block 2.4GHz and above pretty well (assume from the back of the antenna, not the front). Instead of putting antennas on the tops of buildings, let’s look at putting the radios on the side of the buildings. I can see property managers cringing already because they don’t want their buildings looking like NASA. However, our equipment is fairly small. For example, a Ubiquiti Nanostation 2M is about 11 inches tall and 3 inches wide. This AP supports up to 100Mbps+ of real world throughput with a 20MHz wide channel using 802.11N. It’s basically the size of a brick. Paint it red (assuming red brick), hang it 30-100+ feet in the air and nobody would even see it. Throw three of them on a wall and there is 300+Mbps shooting one direction. It’s easy to hit a laptop with these at 1000 feet LOS. This fits pretty much every school out there and since most of the high schools already rent their light poles for cellular phones, it’s not much of a stretch to get the building.

Now throw in the 5GHz versions of the same radio on the same wall using four 20MHz channels in 5.8GHz, and you have 700MHz of bandwidth shooting in one direction. The brick wall eliminates interference from behind the behind or on the sides. Expand this out to 4 walls and 2.8Gbps of bandwidth is now available all over the surrounding area of the building. Assuming the building is 60’ and the houses around the area are 30’ with few trees above 40’, outdoor 5.8GHz CPE’s could easily connect back up to 2-5 miles away with less than $150 in equipment. So for $3000 in radio equipment, you are delivering a massive amount of bandwidth from a central location.

If a student could get direct access to school computer assets at a high bandwidth rates, think about what other services the schools could offer. How does the idea of “Education Everywhere” sound? This was one of my earlier ideas to bring better assets to students and more control to their online experience. Also think in terms of low cost access, breaking the digital divide, and political capital. This idea has many legs.

Don’t stop at schools though. Any brick building with 30’ of height or more is a potential vertical asset. In some cases, you can make a deal to provide internet for a fee inside the building to tenants. In other cases, you might have to give something away for free but you still get the asset. Compared to hundreds or thousands of dollars that cellular or data companies pay for vertical assets, this isn’t a bad idea. You just have to scale the cost to the potential market. In this game, you don’t get the advantage of amortizing losing areas across the big picture.

I leave the details of physically running cabling (through the wall or conduit outside the wall) and bolting against the wall to each individual installer. For example, if there is metal flashing on the roof, it might be easier to use a strap over the roof and paint the radio the same color as the flashing. If you are in the middle of the wall, it might be easier to drill through and bolt in from the back while running the cable through the same hole. There are a hundred ways to make it aesthetically pleasing, but there is no denying the performance capability. If you are really ambitious, you can build a metal box around each one of the radios to reduce noise and tighten up the beam patterns. Of course the installation, switches, and trying to figure out where to get 3Gbps of back end bandwidth is still an issue. I would estimate a full deployment like this around $10K in Arizona.

Take this down to a smaller scale also. One of the complaints for residential deployment is that there may not be vertical assets in every area. Wrong. There are vertical assets in every area. Tell me that there isn’t at least 1 person every square mile that would trade free internet for roof rights to their house. My guess is that there is 10 times that. Because the coverage zone is short, ½ mile every direction, it’s extremely cheap (less than $1000 installed) and quick to install this type of system. If you sell to 10 people per square mile, your monthly vertical asset cost is 1/10^th the monthly revenue or $50. Even if you don’t trust the people in the house to pay the electrical bill, it’s not that expensive to add a meter. Who needs lights when every house on the planet is a potential vertical asset?

On the house, think chimney with some type of metallic shield if you want the signal isolation. Four AP’s with 400Mbps of bandwidth up there cost less than $300 for 360 degrees of short range coverage. If it’s a smaller area, even a single omni-directional antenna can deliver 40 Mbps. If there area is covered with trees, chimneys aren’t high enough, or the Home Owner’s association is run by Ghengis Kahn, then use your imagination. In areas where you aren’t sure that your AP site is going to be stable, use 1x1 802.11N radios with omni-directional antennas on the surrounding client areas so that if you have to move the AP, you don’t have to reposition a bunch of client radios.

Plan for your system to be dynamic and budget for that. Wireline companies generally don’t have that issue. However, the ability to be dynamic and spontaneous is also the advantage to WiFi. As long as you plan on that type of environment instead of being surprised, then this model become significantly more successful.

All of these ideas and techniques are to provide the tools to make WiFi competitive. However, these are still just the technical ideas without getting into the financial details. I wouldn’t propose them if I didn’t know they could be financially successful. If your focus is 100% technical, this doesn’t work. You will absolutely need someone with business and marketing experience to make this happen. I keep learning about new ideas that can generate more revenue daily if the infrastructure is in place, so don’t limit yourself to simply being a bandwidth providers. Associations and strategic partnerships are just as important to the creation of a growing system.

With the economy in a slump, there is always a place for someone to come in and do something cheaper, better, and more efficiently. Southwest isn’t the leader in the industry because they made the best martinis in First Class. They used their people more efficiently and delivered what the client wants. WiFi has the same option as demonstrated by Triad Wireless and other companies. Let’s get it moving people.