Esme Vos of Muniwireless.com ============================= Esme Vos, speaking at the Opening Plenary of the Community Wireless Summit, March 31, 2006 in St. Charles, Missouri. Item: Wireless Summit (opening) Created on: 03/31/2006 - 19:08 EST Duration: 1 hour, 29 minutes, 56 seconds This section: minutes 4:42-17:53 URL: http://commonsvcg.oar.net/LewisClark/ I hope it's OK if I just sit here [at the dais rather than moving to the podium]. I'm a little tired today. This is the last week of my stay during this period in the States. I live in Amsterdam, for those of you who don't know me. I really live in Amsterdam and I come to the States during ... for my conferences. So, I had a conference in Atlanta, March 6 to 7, and I'm here, usually, for, you know, six weeks ... two months, so I'm nearing the end of my stay. And what I'd like to do, really, at this point, is just to update you on where we are in municipal wireless. And I will actually tell you how I started Muniwireless, because some people came up to me today and said, "Oh, we love reading your site and how on earth did you get sucked in to doing such a time consuming thing?" And Sasha [Meinrath, Summit organizer] calls me tireless. I'm just tired most of the time, actually. The whole thing started in June of 2003, because, back then, the founder of a web site called WiFinder, The Hot Spot Directory, Scott Rafer, was living in Amsterdam and I met him in Amsterdam. I was doing some business development and legal work for WiFinder. I'm an intellectual property lawyer. And we got to talking about Wi-Fi, got to talking about all the cool things you can do when you have hot zones. And back then it was just, basically, hot zones in downtown areas. And we got to thinking about the technology and what you could do with it and both were, he and I, were convinced that "Yeah, this can go city wide. Cities can become carriers. And I just happened to be asked to speak at a conference on hot zones. I had to prepare a 20 minute presentation. And the person who asked me was a friend of mine, so I couldn't say "No." And just doing research to make a 20 minute presentation in June 2003 on city hot zones took me hours. You know, Google searches. You know, emailing people. It was such a pain. And then I said to Scott, "Well, if cities are going to set this up, how are they going to find the information? Where are they going to find it?" So he said, "Well, why don't you just set up a site and aggregate the information, so it's easy to find. So I thought, "Uh, you know, why not? I'm not doing anything." I was really bored, in June 2003. The whole market was dead. My clients were somewhere either bankrupt or just waiting to be bankrupt. There wasn't any work. I was bored. So I put together this web site. And the way Muniwireless came was in a dream. One morning early, I was sort of dreaming of Muniwireless. It popped out. I ran to the computer and just registered the domain name. So that's the start of it. And basically, in the very beginning, I just aggregated what other people would write about. You know, for example, the L.A. Times wrote about the Long Beach hot zone. I just put that in there with a little link to their ... to the article. And that's how it started. And very soon, people were just sending me their news and information and the whole thing took off. And I really never thought it would get to this stage. I mean, where we are today, at least with me and Muniwireless, is that I have conferences, I have a quarterly magazine. And what we want to do with the magazine is put in there reports that are much too long and difficult to read on the Internet. My eyes aren't that great, so, you know, age. I'd like to end up reports. We're also doing round tables and webinars. I think in just the last three years we've seen where this has gone. And some people think, Oh you know, because I aggregate all this information and make it easier for people to find it, when they go set up networks, well, for me, it's more like, there's clearly a need out there for these networks. There's clearly people, especially in areas that are under-served by DSL or cable operators, that need this. But also in places that have a lot of DSL and cable. It's very expensive. There's also ... and the bandwidths are really crappy. I mean, I live in Amsterdam and we have a "fiber to the home" project being rolled out right now. I get eight megabits per second downstream and three up and I pay about forty-five to fifty dollars a month. In France, they're paying thirty Euros a month for triple, quadruple play. They have IPTVN. You know, just to show you where ... we have to put this in the context of what's happening around the world. I think one of the problems, whenever I come back to the States, is how inward looking people are. But, you know, seriously, in Europe, Belgacom won the rights to televise, on IPTV, Belgian football matches, soccer matches. Versatel, in the Netherlands, is televising the Dutch soccer matches. It's as if Verizon or AT&T had won the right to televise NFL football games. It's that scale. And they're doing it all over IPTV and they've made certain promises to the national government and also to the holder of the rights, you know, the sort of football association, about the kind of bandwidth they will be delivering, the kind of service. And they managed to do that because there's this real push now in Europe towards, you know, really, alternatives to cable for example, but also to faster and faster Internet and different ways of delivering video. So that's the universe that, at least, I'm sitting in when I go home. And, Amsterdam has a "fiber to the home" network called Citynet that will be completed in about three to four years. I mean, when I say completed, like throughout the entire Amsterdam. And that's, you know, like fifty to a hundred megabits per second. They want it even more. They want to be something like Hong Kong's. And Amsterdam is a city. It's densely populated, but, you know, not so many people, 800,000 people, something like San Francisco. Yet the city government there has decided that it's really important. So, all these things are happening around and when we come back to the discussion of muniwireless in the States, we're seeing that, indeed, it is the push to get away from the duopoly that's making a lot of cities want to deploy city-wide wireless networks, even a county-wide network. That's the big thing now, the counties. Because, Lo and Behold, if you are in a rural area, and you have all these little towns, you know, 10,000 people here, 20,000 people there, each of them find it very difficult to go out and get a service provider or buy equipment. It's very expensive. So, what the counties do, like they've done, by the way, in Sweden for a long time, is to be the central point where they aggregate demand. So a county will put out the RSP, and many counties in the States are doing this, they'll put out an RSP that will be for the entire county. So that becomes very attractive for a network operator, a service provider, a systems integrator, and, indeed, the vendors - the equipment manufacturers themselves, to come and bid on such a project, because that means they are getting 500,000 people in one go instead of 10,000 here, 20,000 there, 50,000 there. So the idea of demand aggregation, I think, is something that has been going on in Europe for a long time and needs to be emphasized in this market, in the United States, to get the rural areas up to speed, as well, on broadband. The latest wrinkle in the whole thing, of course, you know, we've seen, now, in the past year all these anti-municipal broadband bills that have, you know, that the telcos and the cable companies have tried to pass and didn't pass. So, where is telecom these days? Where are those guys, you know? Well, at my conference in Atlanta, I was really surprised to see many of them there. I'm not saying that, you know, AT&T was there, but the regional telecoms operators are very interested in this, you know, regional telcos in North Carolina, for example, or in Georgia, were there. And they came up to me and they even stood up at one of the panel sessions and said, you know, they were really interested in this market and they didn't want to be left behind. And they thought that what they had been doing in the past which was trying to get these bills passed didn't work and now they better have Plan B, which is they didn't want to be left behind. To my surprise the cable companies were there, too. Comcast was there. Cox was there. Time Warner was there. Now, what are they doing in the audience, right? I did not see that at my last conference in San Francisco, which was in September of 2005. So clearly something has happened between September, 2005 and March, 2006 to make all these people suddenly want to pay, you know, a certain amount of money to go to my conference and actually show themselves without hiding their heads under a paper bag, right? Because I know who they are, like "Oh, you're the one who tried to get this bill passed in Texas, right?" So those things are happening and here is my fear which will lead into the discussion here. Two things. There's a bandwidth problem in this country and nobody wants to talk about it. OK? The bandwidth in the United States is crappy. It is so crappy. Every time I come back here, because my bandwidth in Europe keeps going up, higher and higher, and I stay with the same friends whose bandwidth is just exactly the same. Everything just seems very slow. I'm staying with a girlfriend of mine who has launched a video application, an online application, called Dabble.com. What it is is that you find video on the Internet, whether it is a YouTube or BlipTV or someone's private site. You add a little bookmark, you know, to your browser and you click "Add To Dabble" and a page comes down. It's like Flicker, but you don't upload video. You tag video. You search video. It's a way for searching video on the Internet. That's great, except my friend, of course, has a really bad connection, I mean, it's really slow. This is an entrepreneur, you know, in California, in Silicon Valley, right? I mean it's unthinkable that a person like this would have bandwidth this crappy in 2006. And these are the people the VCs in the United States are funding. That's really silly. Bandwidth like that. Now you can imagine if all these other countries have very fast Internet connections, what are their entrepreneurs doing? You know, these Silicon Valley VCs they run around the world. They don't just give money to anybody. They don't care what you look like, as long as you have a good application. Well, who gets to test these applications? Who gets to write them? If your bandwidth is so crappy, you can barely test your own application, I'd say, if someone in Sweden had an idea like that, they'd probably get it funded and probably beat the hell out of you. So, you know, there's an innovation problem. There's a problem of ... And then now we get to the media part, OK? Here's the focus in the United States that I'm seeing when I ask people, "Ah, what kind of bandwidth are you getting?" "Ah, yeah, well, our, my ISP just upped my download speed to like 5. I'm like "Oh, Good for you. And what's you upload?" "384." "What!?! 384? You're joking me!" And now, at Berkeley, where my friend lives, she, her upstream is 384. Now this is a person who is doing the next generation of video search? It's like that. But nobody talks about it. Everybody kind of hides behind it. But that should be discussed and here's the thing. All the big cable companies and the telcos, I'd say even in Europe, they want to give you a lot of bandwidth down because they want to stuff all this stuff. They want to send you their content. They want to ... All the junk that is on TV today, they want you to get it on your computer. But when it comes to actually people making their own video, making very interesting content, whether it's photos or writing something or video, if you have 384, how are you going to upload it? And high definition video? How are you going to do this? It's like, we have the tools now. Video cameras are cheap. There's, you know, you can use very expensive, like, Final Cut Pro software to edit it, but you can also use the cheap one that comes with Apple computers. It's called iMovie. You know, it's pretty decent. It's not bad. You can do a good thing. It's just this bottleneck, you know. That people cannot make their own content. That all of these voices that are dying to be heard. We have blogs today, right? And they're very popular and they're doing a very good job, much better job than the mainstream press. They're all being throttled, because of the total focus on just, you know, maybe big bandwidth down to you and crappy bandwidth up. And that's just a terrible thing, in my opinion. And Muniwireless is just one of those alternative channels for people to get around that whole throttling mechanism that's happening with cable and DSL. In Europe, it's still, you know, we get better bandwidth, but the same tendencies is there, because the same incumbent telcos are still controlling, you know, the telecommunications landscape. So, as we go on when we're discussing this in this room, you know, this is a community wireless summit - one of the problems I see with municipal wireless that could hinder these deployments is that many of them are top down, you know. The city issues a bid, right, an RSP. All these people will respond. It's controlled from somewhere up here. It's slow. It gets mired in politics. Sometimes the wrong service provider is chosen. So what needs to happen, there has to be another mechanism to get this going and this is where community wireless comes in, right? Because there's many of us here who can do this stuff and, hey, maybe if all this pressure comes in from different sides: from a municipality trying to do it, from people trying to do it, we actually get something done that's outside the purview of the traditional cable and telco duopoly. And I hope that, you know, during this conference we will talk to each other and get inspired by ideas. There's a lot of things you can do. And there's not that many place where people can talk about this where all of us are gathered here. So, I hope you will use this time to do that. Thank you. ---- Related links: WiFinder - MuniWireless - Citynet - Belgacom - Versatel - YouTube - BlipTV - Dabble.com - Final Cut Pro - iMovie -