Muni Wi-Fi Redux

Muni Wi-Fi, or Metro Wi-Fi has been riding the hype cycle for a while, and has recently fallen into somewhat of a backlash, for which I'd like to take some credit. Not credit for being a reactionary naysayer, but for at least trying to force some reality into notions of using a Local Area Network technology to cover a whole town. This post is triggered by a piece by Craig Mathias over at Computerworld. That article is singing the praises of Metro-scale Wi-Fi networks, powered by multiple radios. Mathias seems to think that a new multi-radio approach will cure the maladies that have plagued many networks thus far, but this isn't the case. And this cure isn't new: I met with Bel-Air Networks' VP Networking Phil Belanger in 2004, and believe me they were pushing multi-radio solutions all along vs. the Tropos single-radio approach. Problem is more radios/node drives up the cost of the network. Funny, this reminds me of the last time I publicly disagreed with Mr. Mathias. It was 2004, when the future of Bluetooth was unclear to some, and I said, "there is not a credible market-ready solution that truly threatens Bluetooth." and Mathias said, Bluetooth "is largely a vestigial technology now that 802.11 is broadly accepted." That's right. He said Bluetooth would be replaced by...Wi-Fi. Wrong about Wi-Fi then, wrong now.

I've decided to whip off a laundry list of thoughts on Muni Wi-Fi, but to spare those not interested, you need to click 'Read More' to see them.