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A Discomforting Precedent For WiFi "Hot Spots"
rob.sharp writes: "The BBC have some history lessons for wireless networks ...", pointing to an article about a wireless phone service called Rabbit, which relied on access areas similar in concept to the WiFi "hot spots" ISPs and business are experimenting with around the globe right now. ("Subscribers to the service, backed by Hutchison Whampoa, could make mobile calls when they were within 100 metres of a Rabbit transmitter.") Rabbit didn't work out well, though, and the article questions whether 802.11 access providers can do any better.
Its no wonder that the Rabbit system failed. Requiring a mobile phone user to be within 100 meters of a station is extremely limiting. The idea of a mobile phone is that you can use it far from the receiving antenna. There are cordless phones on the market that have ranges of nearly 100 meters from their base station. The Rabbit idea sounds horrible.
I also think the article makes the wrong comparison. Considering the target audience arent wireless hotspots like the early mobile (car) phones? You know the ones like a brick that only worked in the large cities? They took of like the proverbial rccket. Wireless computing is aimed at the business men, kermit was aimed at the consumer.
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Read the article and you'll see that Rabbit failed because there was an always-on functional equivilent.
Can anybody please point to the always on alternative to WiFi networks?
Ok, now that you've mentioned G3, can you find it where I live? No. Ok, lets try again, oh CDCP? Sure, we have it, Lets see, its 19.2K (Higher with compression, WOW!).... WiFi is what? Up to 11Mbps?
The article might be right, but only if something with equivilent speed is more readily available... which it isn't, yet.
It wasn't as bad as it sounds - if it weren't for mobile phones coming up fast at the time it could have been a great success.
If I remember correctly, you got what was essentially a cordless phone and base station - you piad wired rates when at home, and mobile rates when elsewhere.
The good was that anyone walking past your house could use your base station t omake 'elsewhere' calls (on thier bill, of course).
You presumably got a sign in the pack to stick in your window, because there are still some left around in random places. (one in a flat down the road from me).
Rabbit, et al, were implemented as CT2 technology at the end of the 1980s. Four operators were licensed to operate phonepoint (or equivalent) systems. When a user wanted to make a call from a mobile phone, they would lock onto the nearest low-power transmitter; with the aim to place transmitters would be in shops, tube stations, and so on and there would be few gaps in coverage in urban areas.
There was no mobility, as once a call had been set up through one base station it could not be transferred to another, also you could not take incoming calls (unless you were at home, where it worked like a cordless phone).
Rabbit failed because "proper" mobiles (albeit analogue) were taking off and moving from the brick car phone models, and they allowed incoming calls, and movement from cell to cell.
But look what happened to that. Maybe now the time is right (Wi-Fi cards are cheap now, etc).
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The one major drawback with the rabbit phones was that you could not receive incoming calls on them so making them basically useless(You do wonder who comes up with these ideas).
This is not a problem with WiFi because emails onlike phone calls do not need to be handled at once. Basically it will allow you to read the internet and catch up with emails when you get to the station or airport. I can see that being quite attractive.
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Wi-Fi cards have many uses BESIDE use at a hotspot. If Rabbit allowed someone to go from airport to airport, home, work, coffie shop, ... ( Highway ). Wi-Fi is supported by a raft of inexpensive interchangable devices that can be used with any interoperable equipment.
So if I already have a card and I wander into a hotspot I am much more likley to use it. This is much diffrent from purchacing equipment that MUST be used in specific locations.
So Wi-Fi hotspots are taking advantage of what people ALREADY OWN. I can't wander into a coffiee shop or an airport nowadays WITHOUT seeing a laptop out if not a dozen. Comparing this to rabbit would be like trying hotspots in the early 90's, nobody really had the equipment and it would be doomed to fail.
The chances of anyone making money out of the wireless hotspots could be dented by the fact that many community groups and well-intentioned individuals are setting up networks anyone can use for free.
This is how just about everything works on the internet, aside from most broadband connections. Regardless of what corporations are offering, someone else is offering it for free. The record industry wants to sell you CDs, but hundreds of people are willing to just send you a copy online. Subscription news sites, especially gaming ones like IGN and GameSpot, want to sell you their news and content, but Gameforms, The Magic Box, and GameFAQS are all giving the same stuff away for free. And now wireless internet companies are trying to sell you wireless internet access when the same people that are using P2P services are willing to just give internet access away for free.
There simply isn't any way to compete with people that are giving away the same product as your company for free, at least not for a small startup industry that doesn't have the financial and political clout to legislate against the people giving it away for free or strongarm the supply side of the market.
Yeah, I dimly remember those. Used to be a rabbit point in Jericho near where I live. (That would be the Jericho in Oxford).
At the time it seemed a little limiting to me, although I guess since you got a base station in your home, it was better than a regular cordless phone.
These days I'll probably throw my land lines away when I get broadband, mobiles are so cheap and ubiquitous. Times change. Every time I Watch Lethal Weapon, the only thing in it that dates it is a mobile phone the size of a car battery.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
We had something like that in the Netherlands as well (the phone thing, not WiFI hotspots)... I think it was called greenpoint or kermit or whatever... it was something greenish... Can't remember really.... And neither can anyone else... It failed horribly if I recall correctly.
Yea, 3-4x the distance is really a huge difference. 100 meters is crap, but 300 meters is doable.
In addition, if a wireless isp created a semi directional antenta (4 of them, each covering 90 degrees), and was able to boost the signal on each of them, the we would be able to get probably about 600 meters or better out of it.
Tibbon
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It failed.
Mainly because its transmitters were often installed next to public phone booths (argh), and GSM turned out to have a much better coverage.
Nevertheless, I don't see what this has to do with WiFi failing or not.
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I use my mobile phone while I'm mobile. I use my laptop while I'm sitting down (else it wouldn't be a laptop, now would it?)
It's always nice to recall where we've been, but comparing wifi hotspots to the Rabbit project is comparing apples to oranges.
(Apologies for the analogy-links, I couldn't resist)
Ultimately, I think something like that would be ideal for wireless, but I see lots of technical issues on something like that, never mind the political issues of developing coverage.
Trying to do this while trying to maintian free access would be difficult.
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The major ISP's in HK are now wiring up the popular locations like coffee shops, malls locations where people can sit down with their notebooks and surf the net or VPN back into work. The best wireless service is provided by Netvigator. I've yet to see anyone hooked into the net with a wireless connection in HK.
Anyways .. just a couple of pointers from Hong Kong for those who care. :)
Both the 'plans' and 'pay as you go' exist in Canada and the USA. The plans are more popular because the cost per minute of talking time is lower. Also with the pay as you go, you have to keep track of expiry dates and such or your rates go up if you don't refill it in time. The people would rather just have anto-credit card charges as opposed to more bookeeping.
The profit is actually less for pay as you go and my mobile provider (Telus) sent me a letter recently trying to convince me to switch over. To get all the services I get for CAD$10/month on the plans, I'd be paying $40-50 per month (with of course a whole lot more talk time.) Why do you think they offer all kinds of rebates if you sign up on a plan (I could have saved $150 on my new phone if I signed on for 3 years) and nothing similar happens with pay as you go?
Of course this still stinks compared to what's in Europe were you can often just pay one price per month and use it as much as you want and the only thing that can run out is the battery.
The thing with rabbit is that the inconvenience of having to use them in specific areas substantially outweighed the cost benefit of using them. With 802.11, hot spots would only be a questionable model if you could get comparable bandwidth through any other means.
Currently the best wireless services that offer long range coverage provide sporadic service and far lower bandwidth. 802.11 doesn't provide the wide coverage, but it at least gives substantial bandwidth at the shorter ranges. In the long run you can expect that the standard mechanism for doing wireless will be to roam from hot spot to hot spot, using 2.5G and 3G systems to provide some bandwidth when not near a hot sport. Even as 3G systems get built out, the bandwidth capabilities of hot spots will increase to continue to provide value enough to make it worthwhile to people.
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Study compares apples and oranges. Discovers oranges make bad pies. Finding none to encouraging for apple enthusiasts.
BT is reportedly considering prices of up to £85 per month...
The chances of anyone making money out of the wireless hotspots could be dented by the fact that many community groups and well-intentioned individuals are setting up networks anyone can use for free.
£85 per month seems high, but I suppose broad band isn't near as cheap "accross the pond" as it is here. However, free is a lot cheaper, and I'm hoping that there are some "well-intentioned individuals" that can help make that happen.
It would be great to see a web site for freloaders dedicated to WIFI spots where you could enter your zipcode and then find out what is near you to get on, and what you must do in order to get on (hardware, settings, etc.). Anyone know of such a thing?
Rabbit didn't fail because cellular/mobile phones overtook it. It failed because it offered no compelling advantage over a conventional payphone.
Rabbit phones didn't take incoming calls, and were only usable close to a "hotspot" where payphones were plentiful. Call charges were similar, and payphone users didn't need to buy equipment.
Payphones killed Rabbit, and now cellular/mobile is killing payphones. Two separate battles, 10 years apart.
(One marginal benefit of Rabbit was the ability to use the same phone at home with your own personal base station connected to your POTS line, like a conventional cordless phone. This wasn't enough to sell the service though. After the service collapsed, Rabbit phones and home base stations were sold off dirt cheap as digital cordless phones, and very good they were too.)
It was not intended to be used as a mobile phone, rather it was a work around to the restrictions that prevented pay phones being installed in many locations, and the fact that most pay phones were vandalised constantly.
Unfortunately, shortly after Rabbit was launched, the laws were changed to allow more pay phones to be installed (by companies other than BT), so it kind of under cut Rabbit.
This combined with the fact that mobile phones became portable (as opposed to tethered to a car battery) meant the Rabbit didn't really stand a chance. Rabbit was really a case of too little too late.
One point about Rabbit was that you got a base station to use in your home. This base station could also be used by other Rabbit users to make calls if they were in range. This meant that the Rabbit network got larger as more people became customers, just like current community WiFi initiatives such as Consume et al.
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What are you smoking? Per minute charges for telecommunications services in Europe is par for the course. You may be thinking how if someone calls your cellphone (in Europe) they pay an elevated charge (above the normal landline to landline cost) to cover the costs of calling your mobile phone. So in many cases if you have people calling you they bear the extra costs for calling a mobile phone, so you can talk all day because only the person who initiates the call pays while the person who recieves the call does not.
Who provides unlimited mobile calling (outbound) for one flat monthly fee to the public? I'd be willing to bet noone.
My experiences with this came from numerous angry europeans (from Germany in this case) who were enraged when I said that having a pre-determined number of minutes to use your mobile phone per month was not the same as a plan with no 'gotchas' and they told be about paying one price to use it as much as they want (for local calls) ... just like land lines in the USA and Canada.
Also someone else mentioned http://www.boomerangwireless.com/.
Rabbit can't be compared to Wi-Fi in very many ways at all, if any.
Rabbit had to compete on the high end with cellular phones, giving seamles coverage over large areas.
And it had to compete on the low end with pay phones - A MUCH cheaper alternative that it had few advantages over.
What competes with Wi-Fi? There's no mobile equivalent, while 3G may be "fast", Wi-Fi is 10-100 times faster.
Rabbit used a proprietary phone that became a paperweight if service died - Such unease makes customers hesistant. Wi-Fi uses standard hardware that you can use without any service, in your own home.
The problem wISPs will have is "the network" - Coverage is what makes people switch cellular providers, coverage is what will make people switch/sign up for WiFi providers. The founder of Earthlink has found what I consider a pretty good solution to the problem of building a network - It's the exact same technique he used to build Earthlink into a nationwide dialup ISP - Don't build the network yourself, partner with a multitude of ISPs for maximum coverage, eventually buying them if it makes sense to do so.
There's only one comparison to be made here - Just as Rabbit was a souped-up cordless pay phone, Wi-Fi is a souped-up cordless RJ-45 jack. The only decent competition I can see for Wi-Fi is a provider that puts Ethernet hubs in hot-spots to compete - An easy threat for a wISP to avoid - Simply be the one providing and charging for the Ethernet ports too. Once you've got an AP with a connection to the outside network (the hard/expensive part), adding wired Ethernet drops is easy.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My experiences with this came from numerous angry europeans (from Germany in this case) who were enraged when I said that having a pre-determined number of minutes to use your mobile phone per month was not the same as a plan with no 'gotchas' and they told be about paying one price to use it as much as they want (for local calls) ... just like land lines in the USA and Canada.
Also someone else mentioned http://www.boomerangwireless.com/.
Oh, come on. That's nothing at all like what's available in Europe. Boomerang is only in a handful of cities, limits you to one kind of phone ( and you can't use your existing phone) and has only very basic features.
Here's what I get from E-Plus in Germany:
There just isn't any comparison. Yes, Boomerang has a flat monthly rate -- but then they suck in just about everything else.
And I have no "gotchas" with my phone...so, sad to say, American cellphones really do suck. I shudder when I visit my family in the States and see what stuff they are using.
Then I salivate over their cable modem...ah well, you can't have it all. ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
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I had the same question. It would seem that this would be a viable application at least in densely populated areas with good WiFi saturation like NYC or SF.
You should be able to do it with existing hardware, such as multimedia equipped PDA.
Some of the drawbacks have been identified here as reasons why Rabbit couldn't compete with mobile telephony - such as receiving calls would be spotty unless you camped out at known hot spot. But if you worked in an office with a wifi network and had one at home most of the time you would have access most of the time anyway - but these are times when you already have access to the POTS telephone network as well.
The other drawback is that without 100% saturation you would be constantly plagued with dropped calls if you tried to walk or especially drive while on the phone.
For those reasons it would be hard to sell as a standalone service, but if billed with mobile Internet for your PDA which is already up and running, I can't see why people wouldn't pay say an extra $10/month to also get telephony if it meant throwing away the mobile phone and the $30-$40 month cost.
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