Plenary: Technology Roadmap PanelThis plenary session panel provided the primary audience of local-government elected officials and agency executives with a lively debate on existing technologies and applications, spectrum considerations, network management, urban versus rural, and the role of cities in overcoming implementation challenges. Chaired by Rizwan Khaliq, Wireless Global Solutions Executive, Public Sector, IBM, panelists included Greg Richardson, President & CEO, Civitium; Scott Akrie, President & Managing Partner, NetLogix; John Foresto, Managing Partner, Stratum Broadband; and Carl Peede, President & CEO, Camvera Networks. The speakers use several abbreviations: AP = access point
BPL = broadband over power line
CPE = customer premises equipment
ILEC = incumbent local exchange carrier
QoS = quality of service
VoIP = voice over IP * * * John Foresto, Managing Partner, Stratum Broadband: When you’re thinking about the technology and architecture, don’t think about what your doing as hotspot deployment. Think about it as network deployment. When you deploy VoIP, it’s completely different from deploying hotspots. Carl Peede, President & CEO, Camvera Networks: Camvera has put in 25 municipal systems each averaging 150 to 300 square miles each. You won’t see us in Philadelphia. But you will see us in municipalities under 20,000. You can divide a line between the larger communities and the smaller ones—in technology and need. But there’s also a tremendous opportunity. With rural broadband that’s the largest land area of the country, and the challenges are somewhat different. We’re kind of the glue that fits everything together. We’re technology agnostic and want to provide the best solutions for our clients. We’re in six states now in the Southeast. Scott Akrie, President & Managing Partner, NetLogix: We focus on the carrier market and municipal markets. We build for both carriers and municipalities. We offer full life-cycle management. Many of our clients were dying to get into wireless. It was edict from the mayor, city council; the rural ILECs knew they had to do something with wireless, but there was a huge gap in their ability to insource the expertise, so we offer full life-cycle management without a contract. When you want us to leave, we’ll leave. As long as there are success stories, the business will take care of itself. The networks aren’t easy, and they’re application driven, and they take on a life of their own in their own way. Greg Richardson, President & CEO, Civitium: We work with Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland. After going through the Houston County, GA, project, cofounder Matt Stone and I sat down and talked about the challenges and lessons learned. If they were replicated, and local government played a more active role, then chaos would ensue—and chaos breeds opportunity in consulting. We were fortunate to begin working with Philadelphia just before the debacle with Verizon. Our core value that we attempt to deliver is that we are neutral and objective. We don’t deploy networks. We also have a lot of arrows sticking out of our backs and bring a lot of best practices and worst practices. Rizwan Khaliq, Wireless Global Solutions Executive, Public Sector, IBM: Some of the issues around WiMAX and licensed and unlicensed frequencies—what impact will the licensed frequency have once WiMAX is ratified and products start hitting the market? Foresto: The establishment of standards and use of licensed spectrum has a significant opportunity especially for those people looking at building networks with a cellular-type architecture so that you can have more coverage at less cost. You can start interworking those networks using Wi-Fi and WiMAX at the edge. The fact that vendors are supporting that technology is important as we go forward in the WiMAX world. Akrie: Boy, WiMAX versus licensed and unlicensed. As long as you have licensed spectrum, it’s a really wonderful thing, but unfortunately there are many communities that don’t have it, and now it’s being treated as a commodity. I think you’ll see a lot of carrier plays in the licensed arena. Compare Clearwire. As spectrum goes, you’ll see licensed spectrum become commercialized, and teaming with the spectrum holders leading it to the commercial service providers. But there are many out there who aren’t going to be able to afford and hit the price points they want. So I think you’re still going to see unlicensed in a big way. There are a lot of wireless ISPs out there that brought broadband to your community when nobody else would, and they reached a modicum of success—over 2,000 around the country. You’re going to see aggregation and roll-up. A lot of my clients are going to say they can’t afford licensed, and they’re going to start WiMAX-class systems now. They’re going to deliver service one way or another. WiMAX has done a great job in getting a lot of public attention. Wireless, whether licensed or unlicensed, is viable and it’s here, and they’re going to do something with it. Khaliq: Greg, how are you advising customers to proceed? Richardson: We typically advise clients to think about it from the outside in. We’ve noticed three areas of need with respect to wireless technology: a need for an edge (low-cost, ubiquitous, and easy to provision), and that’s why you see Wi-fi and the unlicensed band performing well. In the middle tier, and backhaul, there’s a different set of needs there. In most of the proposals, we’re seeing fixed, multipoint, pre-WiMAX solutions showing up there and competing very well. And the third tier, from a wireless standpoint, is a distribution tier—the need to build a very high performance redundant sonnet-like architecture to link all of those multipoints together. In Philadelphia that might be seven or eight towers, and licensed comes into play there from the standpoint of a fixed point-to-point solution that meets that need. So, I actually think these technologies are competing with one another in a survival-of-the-fittest way. Wi-Fi hasn’t given up in terms of it being something for the conference; it can do metro, too. And WiMAX is trying to cross that bridge into standards based, low cost, CPE, etc. And it’s going to be how vendors develop and mature those products and what applies to which tier of the network. Khaliq: Pre-WiMAX is a great backhaul technology. Carl, do you see more investment as the standard gets ratified and products actually ship out with WiMAX certification. And on the mobility side, what impact will that have on Wi-Fi that’s already been deployed? Peede: If you go back to the modem days, they found out that acceptance of the technology was predicated a great deal on the cost of the CPE device. That’s one thing that WiMAX will do: create some interoperability to allow the price point to come down and the acceptance to go up. Regarding licensed versus unlicensed, in the rural parts of the country, unlicensed will continue quite a time into the future. You’re looking at several years before WiMAX makes a great penetration into the rural areas. So, WiMAX will make a big difference. I think the impact on the rural part will be different in the short term. Khaliq: In reference to Philadelphia and San Francisco, the business model is still evolving. What applications are you seeing to justify the investment into an infrastructure? Richardson: From a municipal government side, we see interest in smart parking-meter management. In public safety, transportation—these are hot areas. From public access, I’d agree with Paul Butcher—sometimes it is just about the pipe. Cities tend to talk about three areas: municipal needs, social needs, and economic development. Applications vary depending on which of those silos we’re talking about. Akrie: There are four fundamental models within a municipality. There is no free lunch. One is the taxpayer model. Somebody wants to offer free Wi-Fi service in an area and the taxpayer will pay for it. In another, we’ll charge people for it. We’ll get a service provider, or do it ourselves. Then there’s the model where we’ll charge for advertising (Google). The fourth is rare—the self-pay model, looking at what your telecommunications needs and uses are right now. It’s rare when a community takes an inventory of all the needs and focuses on the applications on top of that to find the return on investment. But you have to tear down walls and get all the agencies in there. Peede: The city managers we talk to are concerned about the system working. They want to make sure it pays for itself in a reasonable amount of time, and that it provides the needs and services they say it does. Whenever it gets involved, it’s typically successful, if you get the community behind it. Khaliq: You mention public safety and public access in the same breath. What type of fire wall or security are the CTOs or managers looking for? Foresto: Most city managers and CIOs are confident about a VPN solution. Beyond that, it’s unique. They all would rather have their own network, and not be worried about security. But most are comfortable with a VPN. Akrie: We’re seeing totally separate networks, and allocating fiber for the public network. We’re seeing VLAN technology to keep the networks separate, and they want public safety traffic to ride the network as well, and QoS to give the public safety traffic higher priority, and give voice priority (as a back-up VoIP solution). Khaliq: When I asked about the different applications, no one mentioned VoIP. There’s an ROI value prop for governments. On maintenance and quality of service, what do you once the network is up and running? Are governments in the right position to own these networks to provide that QoS? Richardson: In most of the major cities, it’s a public-private partnership model that’s the norm. In those cases, an arrangement is made between the service provider and a nonproft. The provider is contractually obligated to meet service levels with respect to time to repair, customer service wait times. In cases where cities own their own network, we see the city outsource the majority of the design, deployment and management to companies who specialize in the enterprise and communication sector managing large-scale networks. We don’t see many examples where the city’s IT group is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance. Khaliq: From the sound of it, there’s very much a role for a service provider to play in this area. Foresto: I’ve yet to see a city step up to run it, and most want to find a way to outsource it. One of the big things on the service side is that a lot of the institutions have existing relationships with systems providers to do the work. Peede: We’ve separated maintenance and support into two broad areas: 1. Support of the system itself (networking and RF piece), and 2. The end user support, and we provide a help desk. But the local truck rolls, it’s typically better for the city to do that. They know the environment. We do the backbone and systems integrity, but the local support is done directly by the city, or on a contract basis. Akrie: At the beginning of Wi-Fi there were several municipalities who put an AP in a conference room, and that was OK. And then it was 5, 10 APs. Network technology increased the complexity of network management exponentially. And we can say that because we are managing mesh networks. Every vendor will introduce you to its own proprietary management system. They’re all different, and some work better than others. But when you’re looking at a mesh network, it’s meshing and reconnecting. And there are gateways, routers. The management function becomes extremely complex. We’ve developed a product that gives them a report so they can understand what’s going on with their network. The systems you need to manage are more complex now. Khaliq: Broadband over power line (BPL)—as we talk about a hybrid network, with WiMAX, Wi-Fi and fiber, BPL would have a role to play there. Richardson: BPL has a great promise as a technology. Taking advantage of any existing infrastructure to lower the cost is a good thing. I’d downplay the importance of BPL just a bit. People make tradeoffs on two dimensions in how they see the value of it. I pay for my cellular service about $225 a month, on their GPS network, and it’s relatively slow. And I pay $50 a month for a high-speed connection at home. Being able to take that service with me has value. BPL is handicapped here, just as any wireline technology is handicapped here: it’s fixed. I think it’s a great technology, if it works, and the interference issues are resolved. Khaliq: It could still play a very strong backhaul role.
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