Slashdot Mirror
How Much is Riding on Wi-Fi?
nexex writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's John Cook explores the current flood of money on wireless networking startups and if they could be heading towards another dotcom bubble. Interesting tidbits include, ;More than 60 Wi-Fi start-ups have raised more than $650 million in the past two years, according to VentureWire. Last quarter, there was more money invested into wireless technologies than networking and enterprise software.'" The article's got some good commentary on grassroots-founded tech trends vs. investment-backed tech trends, and tries to explain why wi-fi has caught on so well.
People Please have a real busness model to work with. The economy is shity as it is, we do not need you to do the same thing that happened in the dotcom time frame to do more harm to the economy. What I mean just don't start a WiFi company and expect that you will become rich with out doing any work. First look at the market you are looking at and see if the market will support the company, not all places will generat enoph revenue to justify the startup of a WiFi company. Also remember you will have to secure the network ( may I suggest pppoe ). Why do I say this, because you don't want just any one to use your network with out paying you. No the internet should not be free (as in beer). Before fire off you flame or mod me down let me explane first. The internet has costs associated with it, bandwithe is not free, the needed hardware is not free, then there is the mantance of the hardware, then there is the security level. All of these will add costs to the setup. A company will have to bring in a large sum of money to cover even a small matropistic area. Also are you going to use only one of the wireless tech, customers might want all of them, there that costs even more. I would say that it would be best to use only 802.11g, yes the costomer will have to shell out a large sum of money upfront for the technology, but the company could save on a few less access points. Plus less physical hardware to setup, and access when something goes wrong. And less in the form rent the the owner of the location.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see this happen in my area but there are many considerations to take into account.
I would like to ask how much you are going to charge for the access. You will have to charge a high e enough prices to make a profit but not so high that people will find it cost too much for them, thus making it only a nitch market for us geeks.