So, if you think of a mesh network as simply a series of small low-power nodes that transmit data via small hops to other nodes until the packets reach their destination, and then you think about countries with thorough handset penetration and frequent handset upgrades with small geoboundaries, isn't Japan ...or maybe verizon in manhattan, a likely candidate for deploying a multi-protocol network via the mobile phone? ie, why wouldn't my verizon handset just a router on the verizon manhattan mesh network.
of course, with today's battery life and throughput and whatnot, this doesn't work, but we know these problems solve themselves (ok, they don't solve themselves, really smart engineers solve them) in short periods of time. It was just last year that people were saying 3G wouldn't fly because the batteries for the handsets couldn't keep up.
one problem is that the operators don't want to just be a dumb pipe. to which i reply, some of my best friends are dumb. seriously, what's wrong with being a dumb pipe AND a smart phone? do i, dick costolo, emperor of all that i see, care if my phone is transporting part of joe blotnick's term paper on a wifi network when i'm not using the requisite transport capabilities? the answer is no, i don't care. i suppose, more specifically, the answer is "no, i don't care, especially if i don't know", but that's another story.
Anyway, this leads us to the inevitable 3G vs. wifi debate. I think i'm of the minority opinion that 3g is a transition that ultimately and perhaps fairly quickly goes away and 802.11 transports become the norm for everything. Why deploy a proprietary 3g network (that only your customers use) when you can literally "light" your own proprietary mesh network (on a protocol that everybody needs and uses) by simply charging folks who come into your stores $300 for a router with a dial pad on it? you then pick up a bunch of extra pennies for backhauling other people's wifi traffic around town and voila, your ARPU numbers go up, up, and away. maybe it will become combined ARPU and ARPB (avg revenue per bit/byte?), since you can't really count "users" in this case.
We'll see.
Posted by Dick at July 28, 2003 08:45 PM