Pizza Without Wires

a2gsg was one of several to submit this story about a pizza chain in Malaysia building a high-speed wireless broadband network -- so its customers can order pizza and connect to the net. Pinoygrams, anyone?

Comments

Slick

[sulli]

I like how 802.11 is being called "4G". Think of how much egg the telcos will get on their face for spending $Bs on 3G licenses - and then being upstaged by something as simple as ethernet!

More seriously, this is a good idea. By the way, SBUX has a few locations now with 802.11 in the cafe for surfing with your laptop - not quite the same scale, but similar in that they are filling in the coverage gaps where other carriers fear to tread (or go bankrupt - e.g. Ricochet).

Putting it all together

[martyb]

From the article: (my emphasis)

• The company, Pizza Station, is dishing out an offer which promises to whet the appetite of all pizza lovers and then some: "Buy a pizza and get free wireless broadband".
• And the clincher is it will cost less than RM3 million to roll out just such a solution...
• "Roughly, I see revenues of RM4 million this year, RM12 million next year and RM20-RM30 million the following year...

So it looks like they are expecting to recoup their expenses pretty quickly. Which begs the question, just HOW MUCH do one of these pizzas cost?

Possible advertisement? Buy a pizza for $500, get broadband access free!
:*)

Yeah, but they use proprietary protocols...

[Eryq]

• FTP: Forget The Pepperoni (faster transfer)
• HTTP: Heated Thermal Transportation Package (bulky but very popular)
• SMTP: Small Meatless Thin-crust, Please (lightweight but very popular)
• UDP: Unreliable Delivery Person (cheap, but may not get there at all)
• TCP: Terrifying Cascade of Pizzas (we send your order every 30 minutes until you tell us to stop)
• GOPHER: Go Out to Pizza Hut, Eat, Return (not used much these days, but real nice once in a while)

This is actually interesting.

[phoenix_orb]

Finally, a company that gets it. 3G is so expensive... why do you think companies have scaled back large deployment of it? And here is a company (that isn't even a telco..) that is using 2.4ghz and 5.7ghz band (which is unlicenced, and therefore, free..) to have higher speed connectivity. This is similar to Apple's airport in design, since it is going to be using the 802.11 standard.... but Airport uses only the 2.4 ghz band.

I will be interested in knowing how this Pizza company will implement security. The free wireless networks in place in Seattle and San Francisco still do not have great security, as there isn't great security inherent in the protocol. I would hate to have someone snagging my email or telnet sessions out of the air.. (and yes, I do use PGP and SSH.. but many people do not...)

I do happen to find it interesting about this company... A pizza company no less. I work for a CLEC, and I see all kinds of executives here who still don't get broadband... (as crazy as that sounds, it is true..) I honestly hope that this company can implement this.

This reminds me of companies who designed broadband connectivity that went through power lines... and had an impossible time trying to convince the Power companies. They simply didn't understand the resources that they had. Now, we are entering an age where in fact wires can be made obsolete ( for the most part...) and we can send out high speed data though the air. Now, if we can just get the security down, and make sure that they don't cause cancer.. and microwave towers can...